Helene and Owen are married and are both successful, ambitious human resources managers. They thrive on lean cuisine and the opportunity to downsize companies - corporation speak for throwing workers on to the scrapheap. Not for nothing is Owen known as Machete Man. But then Machete Man himself gets the chop.
Soon the kitchen of their Milton Keynes apartment becomes a microcosm of modern global capitalism and labour relations. Unexpectedly finding herself a "single income with spousal dependent", Helene merely sets about protecting her economic viability. She presents Owen with a bill, and as he has no capital or income, his only option is to sell her his labour. War breaks out in the kitchen, and someone is going to get hurt.
Vanessa Badham is a young Australian playwright, and this short, sharp little satire suggests she has the potential to be a major talent. It could be taken as a parable about gender relations and marriage as an economic union, but its savage, surreal scenario cleverly uses the domestic to highlight the insanity of a wider world where people are expendable to the interests of multinational corporations and governments, and lives and communities are casually destroyed in pursuit of profit.
This is a very funny, unusually political 55 minutes, made all the more palatable by Nina Millns and George Perrin as the couple who eat each other up.
· Until August 25. Box office: 0870 701 5105.
