We know, from Gagarin Way and The Straits, that Gregory Burke can write snazzy dialogue. We also know that he's a dab hand at mixing flights of erudition with displays of testosterone. But his third play, co-produced by the Court and Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, confirms Burke's gifts without imaginatively extending them.
The action starts in a Scandinavian slammer where two guys are penned up during an English soccer match. The cryptically named H is a glib Mancunian spiv. His cockney cellmate, Daz, is a former ex-Marine commando. Having chummed up with the dreamy Daz, H offers to cut him in on a dodgy deal of supplying false passports to an old Scouse colleague, Ray. But, when the three men finally meet up in a blandly luxurious hotel room, we get a triangular power play in which it takes time to deduce who is calling the shots.
In form, the play owes a visible debt to Mamet's American Buffalo. In theme, it derives from Darwin's Origin of The Species. Burke's main point is that in the naturally selective world of petty crime, it's only the biggest sharks who survive. Even technology is undercutting the livelihood of the small-scale villain: as Ray, a ticket tout ruined by the internet, complains: "You take away a man's fuckin' right to manipulate the price an' what's he got left?"
But although Burke makes some sharp social points, not least that soccer's a great cover for smuggling, his play depends too heavily on a foreseeable plot twist. It also never makes the Brechtian connection between the criminal sub-class and the wider world. You are left admiring the racy chat and some cool performances from Jeff Hordley as the auto-didact Mancunian, Andrew Schofield as the wiry Scouser and Paul Anderson as the deceptive Daz. Matt Wilde's production also orchestrates the action with jazzy effectiveness and Lisa Lillywhite's design has the right Scandinavian spareness. I just wish that Burke, having written a trio of lively plays about vainglorious masculinity, would venture out into the wider world of mature relationships. At the moment I feel he's writing within his talent rather than incrementally expanding it.
· Until October 22. Box office: 020-7565 5050. Then at the Everyman, Liverpool
