I begin to worry about the new Hampstead regime. Having already given us a thematically over-burdened play by an established writer - Clare McIntyre's The Maths Tutor - Anthony Clark now comes up with this weird confection by Stephen Lowe that suffers precisely the same fault.
At first we seem to be on safe, sexual territory. Lowe posits the idea of four couples meeting up in a Lakeside retreat for a partner-swapping weekend. Since the couples include a pompous academic and his nervous wife, a raffishly experienced, working-class duo and two covert documentary film-makers, we assume that not all will go swingingly. And sure enough as the ill-assorted pairs adopt various roles they begin to reveal their inner insecurities.
Having bombarded us with seaside-postcard innuendo, Lowe gets increasingly serious. First he starts to lecture us about the voyeuristic nastiness of reality TV; but, since the stage is filled with pseudo-tarts and vicars and nurses and doctors, his harangue falls on somewhat stony ground.
He then adds a religious dimension by suggesting that we are still crippled by Pauline guilt and that it would be possible to rewrite the Fall of Man from a humanist, not to say pornographic, standpoint.
I am all for ambition but Lowe comes bearing more messages than a Yuletide postman. He never seems sure whether he is attacking self-deluding swingers, tabloid television, prurient peeping-toms or theocratic religion: he is like a wild marksman aiming at so many targets he misses each of them. What starts as a realistic comedy also becomes a drama slowly cracking under the weight of its own symbolism: it is not enough for the setting to be an Edenic garden conservatory but a pre-Raphaelite triptych of Adam and Eve suggests that paradise, having been lost, can still be regained.
I wish I could say Clark's production sorted out the confusion but Rachel Blues's set, in which things are constantly being knocked over, is as cluttered as the text. And, while the actors do a valiant job, they never seem sure whether they are in a sex-comedy or a metaphysical drama. My hat goes off to Michael Elwyn and Julia Swift as the nervous middle-class pair and to Paul Slack as a dedicated swinger for whom three's company, two's none. But the cast are as under-dressed as the play is over-weighted.
· Until January 31. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
