Lloyds Newson's latest work is an assault on consumer culture - the scramble for style, beauty and success upon which the western world is currently hellbent. Just for Show also happens to be the glossiest production DV8 have ever put on stage. The irony is presumably intended.
Newson has always had an eye for designers and performers and this time he's gone shopping for some of the best. Unusually, he requires his cast to flaunt their skills to the limit, for dance in this show functions as the ultimate metaphor for the cult of the body beautiful. Though Newson famously disapproves of the narcissistic tendencies of his profession, entertainingly for the audience he allows this production a string of show-off routines.
When they're not dancing, his cast of nine desperate wannabes are acting out other aspirational scenarios. Tanya Liedtke, the self-appointed hostess, is blonde, beautiful and exhorts us to the same route of self-improvement that she herself has taken. Even when knotted into an extreme yoga pose she can still indefatigably chant her mantra: "in with the good out with the bad".
What these characters cannot do is make contact with each other. They speak only in jargon-ridden monologues, during sex they remain neurotically aware of how they look. Image is all, and at one point the cast even stop to ask the audience how they might improve the presentation of the show.
One possibility they offer is extra content, and disappointingly this is something the production cries out for. Newson does of course smuggle moments of doubt and darkness into his material: the preening disco dancer who is clearly a prisoner of his own vanity, the woman trying to put a facade of happiness on her crumbling marriage. Newson ends with a haunting snapshot of one man dancing alone in a ghostly static of white light - opening up the core of nothingness around which these characters' lives revolve.
But these brief images, while potent, don't penetrate very far below the surface. Newson at his best knocks us off balance, gets under our skins. In Just for Show he gives us an ironic lifestyle catalogue, whose message is pretty much on a par with Desperate Housewives.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 024-7652 4524. Then at the Lowry (0161-876 2000), Salford, from June 9.
