For a girl with high standards, Cora Papadakis lets her knickers drop very quickly when lithe young drifter Frank Chambers arrives at the Twin Oaks, an isolated roadside diner near Los Angeles. Cora has let her dreams corrode in return for a dull marriage to Nick, a Greek-American. So Frank has barely got through the door and put his fingers in the till before Cora is eyeing him up with the ravenous look of a tiger that hasn't seen fresh meat for months. Soon the two are gobbling each other up, and as the body heat rises, so does the body count.
Hell is lots of very good sex and a very bad conscience in this adaptation of James M Cain's thriller, famously made into a classic film noir in the 1940s. Lucy Bailey's enjoyably steamy production is full-on and full frontal, piling on the atmosphere with creaking boards and swinging signs as the couple ineptly try to polish Nick off and escape the consequences.
The evening is greatly helped by Charlotte Emmerson and Patrick O'Kane who, as Cora and Frank, exude buckets of sweat, sizzle and sex - although you wish that Andrew Rattenbury's version offered more fully fleshed-out characters rather than just lots of flesh. In the end, what you get is 21st-century sex allied to mid-20th-century morality, and the message is clear: there are no happy-ever-afters for the guilty.
Bailey's production is very hot in the first half but crashes to a halt with a bit of design business that is as ludicrous as it is spectacular. It never quite recovers. The inevitable takes an awfully long time to unravel as the corrupt machinations of lawyers start to seem far more interesting than the knickerless trysts and violent scraps of the guilty lovers. After a while, the sheer stupidity of Cora and Frank begins to grate to such an extent that you start feeling it is just as well that they won't get a chance to contribute any further to the gene pool.
· Until October 16. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
