Mark Ravenhill has already depicted sex as a transaction in Shopping and Fucking, and considered the role of the family in Handbag. The two interests collide in this all-singing, all-dancing, all-sodomising extravaganza, which has transferred from the National.
Ravenhill's lusty bugger's opera is set largely in a molly house, a kind of 18th-century private club where gay men could dress up as women, act out their fantasies and have frequent sex. Somehow the playfulness of his writing, its glee and the almost wide-eyed wonder with which he confronts sex, undercut the explicitness. The only scenes that shock are those of a modern orgy held by an affluent gay couple in their Bloomsbury loft. But it is not the up and down and in and out flagrancy of it that shocks you. It is the utter joylessness.
The journey from 18th-century innocence to 21st-century ennui begins in Mr and Mrs Tulls's failing dress shop, where shepherdess costumes are hired out to whores. When her husband, riddled with the pox, suffers a fatal apoplexy brought on by a young apprentice girl's upfront delight in the price of her virginity, mousy Mrs Tull is quite lost.
Soon, though, Mrs Tull becomes possibly the first person to realise the power of the pink pound. Inspired by her shop boy, Martin, who is just discovering his sexuality in the dark haunts of Moorfields, she opens a molly house. Before long the seduction of capitalism is complete, the childless Mrs Tull has been transformed into an 18th-century Mother Courage, and the molly houseoffers an alternative form of family to the lusty gay boys.
Ravenhill's play is more romp than closely argued thesis. There is nothing wrong, however, with a drama that suggests liberation comes with being yourself, gender is not as fixed as we insist on believing, and that while love may cause grief, sex with affection makes us human and sex without puts us with the animals.
Nicholas Hytner's brilliantly acted production is both ebullient and carefully controlled, bringing shape to a play that might otherwise seem a bit sprawling. This is a play about pleasure for sale, and all you have to do to enjoy yourself is buy a ticket.
· Until March 16. Box office: 0870 400 0805.
