The original title of David Lewis's play was Sperm Wars. Why this had to change is unclear - perhaps people don't want sperm on the posters in Bolton - but it indicates better the biological nature of Lewis's acerbic comedy for a quartet of actors plus a supporting cast of thousands of the little blighters. Tinkering with the title just leads one to suspect that Misconceptions has been misconceived.
The fertile theme is infertility, as experienced by an intellectually overstimulated, middle-class couple who aren't growing any younger or any fonder of each other. Matthew, a biology lecturer with an enormous ego and tiny sperm count, has been attempting for years to impregnate his wife by arithmetic. Suspicious of doctors, he has taken up fertility treatment as a hobby. His trendy London flat is stuffed with box files full of calculations based on menstrual cycles and temperature charts - the baby itself having apparently become reduced to a small piece of algebra in a knotty equation.
His wife, Linda, has a problem with this - until solace arrives in the obliging form of Barry, an accountant Matthew has nominated as sperm donor. How Barry chooses to make his monthly deposit fuels the emotional centre of the comedy.
The play is determined to grapple with big ideas, from which it emerges slightly the worse off. It tries too hard to demonstrate biological determinism, and this shoehorns the characters into unwieldy philosophical arguments that strive for the ring of truth but often sound only the dull clunk of contrivance.
Though well served by committed, fluent acting, Simon Stallworthy's production batters the point home. Sperm motifs and DNA spirals embellish Dawn Allsopp's set, while in-utero video footage pulsates between scene changes. It's hard to imagine how much more explicit the theme could be made, short of issuing the men in the audience with sample bottles to fill.
The real difficulty is a situation that prevents you warming to the characters. You can't help feeling that a man who invites a colleague round to masturbate for his wife must be a bit of a tosser himself. Such an ill-formed scheme was always going to come to a sticky end.
Until February 17. Box office: 01204-520661.
