Have you ever felt a twinge of envy after hearing of a friend's success? Have you ever longed for all those Icaruses up there - people who are no more talented than you, but who twinkle in the firmament while your feet are in the mud - to crash and burn?
If this new collaboration between Mark Ravenhill and Frantic Assembly is shocking, it is only because it tells the messy truth, and voices the unspeakable. Played out on Miriam Buether's dazzling, white-tiled set which serves as a giant swimming pool that dwarfs the protagonists, a clinical hospital room and a confessional stained with unclean thoughts and actions, Pool (No Water) allows us inside the heads of "the group", four former art school students.
Once, there were seven of them, but two are dead and one has flown so far above the rest that she is just as unreachable. It is around her new swimming pool that the quartet gather in the knowledge that they will never enjoy her success and their lives will never again have the colour they did in that first shared studio a decade ago. For them, "the sad rot to the grave has already begun".
The wordiness of Ravenhill's script takes a while to be reconciled with the physical, but the two eventually collide and explode in 80 dynamic minutes that turn its characters inside out. The play doesn't just ponder friendship, it also considers the morality of turning other's lives into your art - and asks what is art actually for.
It could be a horribly cynical evening, but it is suffused with bitter pain and lit by the suggestion that we can transcend our baser instincts - but only when we face the real truth about ourselves.
· Until October 7. Box office: 01752 267222. Then touring.
