Dramatising recent, high-profile events is hard work. Your audience knows both the broad shape and particular detail of the narrative, so you don't have recourse to the dramatic staples of intrigue and inventive denouement. So writing a play of this kind, where half the characters are journalists - and the world of hacks is notoriously difficult to portray convincingly - could be seen as a masochistic, doomed endeavour.
Yet Ron Hutchinson has chosen to write about the scandal of the Mirror's fake photographs of abused Iraqi prisoners. The result is a play that dwells on the ramifications of that case, and ponders the wider cultural significance of such visual fakery in this digital age. Hutchinson paints two worlds: that of a tabloid newspaper; and the washed-up life of the 26-year-old former soldier who decides to flog a simulacrum of an atrocity to the highest red-top bidder.
The play's limitation lies in its portrayal of the media world, where just about every cliche about journalists is aired, and the characters are little more than representatives of viewpoints through which Hutchinson rehearses ethical and moral dilemmas. Yet its considerable power lies in its depiction of the brutalised and brutalising soldiers, and it is here that the production makes its stirring impact, especially in the second half. This world feels urgently real, and is written with a rare empathy that is enriched by Alistair Wilkinson's immensely assured performance as the troubled, unlikeable soldier who sells the pictures. Once Hutchinson stops mulling over the bigger questions and gets down to what makes this group of complicit individuals tick, this lifeless debate melts into affecting, vital drama.
· Until June 16. Box office: 0117-902 0344.
