Not every hyped Edinburgh hit turns out a stinker. After the painful whimsy of Auntie and Me, we have a play by Gary Owen that offers an intriguing inversion of our society, in which beauty is a prerequisite for success and ugliness is seen as a moral failing.
In Owen's Orwellian world a kind of anti body-fascism prevails. Control has passed to the "citizens" who are clumsy, graceless, and flabby. Against them are the perfectly-formed "radiants" who are systematically being exterminated. When the unloved Darren takes in a pair of fugitive radiants, he finds himself both stricken with desire and blackmailed by a female cop called Kelly who, like him, yearns for physical contact.
Although set in the future, Owen's play is a satire on our preoccupation with surfaces. The old joke was that "politics is showbusiness for the ugly": now, however, not only politicians but novelists, newsreaders, and nuclear scientists are judged by their sex appeal. Owen posits an upturned world in which the physically challenged get their sadistic revenge on the narcissistically handsome. He also shows how hatred of the other is mixed with a secret, bubbling envy.
Owen can certainly write: Darren says of the beautiful Tara that "her gaze slides right off me". His problem is that he also overwrites - lapsing at times into a phrase-making prose poetry. What keeps his play alive is his quasi Jacobean fascination with the impolitic body as well as the body politic. At one point Darren, like a furtive drug dealer, trades Tara's hair and teeth for water, and perversely discovers that her ruined mouth only makes her more attractive.
It is a disquieting play excellently directed for Paines Plough by Vicky Featherstone, who animates even the clunkier passages of narrative and choreographs her four actors with precision. Neil Warmington's set, with its upstage floral aquarium and gleaming patch of AstroTurf, also evokes a world that is garishly strange without lapsing into the clichés of fuliginous futurism.
Rightly, the physical have-nots also possess their magnetism. Eileen Walsh, a face that can pass in a second from toothy angel to avenging devil, is compelling as the anguished cop, and Neil McKinven lends Darren the voyeuristic solitude of someone excluded from physical pleasures. And, as the beautiful people, Josephine Butler and Theo Fraser Steele suggest radiance carries its own sickness. What holds the play together, however, is Owen's Websterian preoccupation with the skull beneath the skin.
· Until February 15. Box office: 020-7610 4224.
