Martin Duncan has certainly kept faith with Botho Strauss. Having given us Time and the Room by Germany's most famous living dramatist, he now directs Jeremy Sams's version of Strauss's blackly funny vision of life on the edge of the inferno. Written in 1988, this 90-minute collection of 11 mordant sketches is like an intimate revue written by Sartre and Beckett.
What makes one warm to Strauss is his ability to satirise his own bleak view of individual desperation and social decline. In one item a radio interviewer confronts a professional doom-monger who announces that mankind is "nature's mistake": unfortunately his deafness prevents him grasping his interrogator's questions. And there is similar subversive humour in a sketch where a self-important suicide finds himself eternally attached to a nerdish void. But everyone, he is told, "gets the void they deserve".
It is no accident that both these sketches feature Steven Beard: a small, puckish actor whose pear-shaped vowels hilariously suggest punctured academic prissiness. But Beard really comes into his own as a car park security guard who decides that, in an uncertain world, he needs a bodyguard. Strauss makes it a study not only of an eccentric loner but of the pervasive paranoia of modern life.
What unites these sketches is the idea that collectively we live on the brink of destruction while individually our lives are increasingly robbed of dignity. One figure (Steven Ventura) is firstly humiliated in a TV competition and then selected by a computer as "one of the most insignificant people in the world". Even if you don't buy into Strauss's absurdist philosophy, there is a contrapuntal gaiety to his pessimism.
Duncan's production, filled with the paraphernalia of modern technology in Ashley Martin-Davis's design, is also wittily acted by the ubiquitous Beard, Fiona Dunn and George Cuyas as a bride and groom confronted by a guest-free wedding and Darlene Johnson as a complaining tenant grappling with Kafkaesque bureaucracy. They bring a true ensemble spirit to Strauss's collection of pungently purgatorial vignettes.
· Until September 25. Box office: 01243 781312.
