When a bee stings, it dies. It may destroy the creature that threatens it, but in the process it destroys itself. So it proves for Mr Ido, a successful Japanese businessman, who returns home from work one evening ready to celebrate his son's sixth birthday and have sex with his wife (it is a Thursday, and Thursday is their love-making night) only to discover that his wife and child have been taken hostage by an escaped convict.
Finding the media intrusive with their prurient demands to know how he is feeling, and realising that police incompetence will make a dismal situation worse, Mr Ido takes matters into his own hands. He goes to the house of the convict's wife and child and takes them hostage himself.
When the chief of police berates Ido for bashing a policeman on the head in the process, claiming the officer was a fine man who was committed to protecting decent society, Ido merely replies: "I was a member of that society until quite recently, but I found I have no aptitude for being a victim." In fact, as the situation escalates, Mr Ido displays an aptitude for revenge and a flair for combining sex and violence.
Based on a short story by Yasutaka Tsutsui, this satire on what happens when the victim becomes the aggressor is extremely simple but lifted out of the ordinary by Kathryn Hunter's superb gender-bending performance as the ruthless Mr Ido, and by Hideki Noda's production in which the everyday and the bizarre, the real and the surreal become as mangled as a bowl of noodles. It is a slightly weird and wholly unsettling 75 minutes.
· Until July 15. Box office: 0870 429 6883.
