Theatre

TINDERBOX Bush Theatre LONDON **

There's a man who addresses his spouse as "Wife", but otherwise Lucy Kirkwood's play has little in common with a fairy tale - at least, not the one of the same title. A better case could be made for its likeness to Hansel and Gretel, as this fantasy, set in a Bradford butcher's, also deals with two innocents held captive by an ogre. There are plenty of other allusions and echoes - Joe Orton, Black Mischief, Rigoletto, Sweeney Todd. Unfortunately, Kirkwood doesn't manage, in this overlong play, to incorporate them into a consistent tone or energetic plot. There's less childish wonder than childish self-indulgence.

The Orton note is struck early and hard. Saul, the proprietor of an establishment that seems to have last done business when Bradford ate pork, offers a job to a Scottish vagabond named Perchik. "Your low horizons and negligible intellect suggest you would be quite perfect for the role," says Saul. Withdrawn at first, Perchik perks up when he meets Saul's wife, Vanessa, the former star of a series of "pornographic films intended to broaden the appeal of the Conservative Party".

But while Kirkwood gives us Orton's absurdity and empty grandeur, she does not supply the cake to which these are but the frosting. Beneath the fancy there is no love for the desperate and downtrodden, and for the way their stunted, banal language can erupt into accidental poetry. Nor do her characters have any urgent goal - Perchik chases Vanessa round the shop, and Saul, cleaver in hand, chases Perchik, like three figures in a slow-motion cuckoo clock. Perchik's attempts to leave do not increase even after he discovers, by examining the contents of the stewpot, what has happened to the couple's previous assistants.

If the facetiousness of the dialogue soon palls, however, there is no fault to find with Josie Rourke's immensely skilful cast - Sheridan Smith's doe-eyed, charmingly venal Vanessa; Jamie Foreman's suavely thuggish Saul, brilliantine coating hair and voice alike; Bryan Dick's wistful, plucky Perchik. Sartaj Garewal and Nigel Betts also turn in sterling performances as, respectively, an Asian detective with a taste for evil pranks and a large but timid customer who seems to be the brother of Lady Chatterley. Their talents deserve better than a lame, protracted skit.

To 24 May (020-7610 4224)

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