Absurdly conventional

Beneath the avant-garde mannerisms of Howard Barker's new play, something deeply conventional is wriggling.

The veteran author directed the piece himself, punctuating the action with stings culled from Stockhausen CDs - and allowing his designer, Thomas Leipzig, to fill the set with bare bulbs and tarnished mirrors.

Barker also seems to have written the programme notes, which rail against the "sordid habit of social realism". But below the script's absurdist bafflegab, Dead Hands is a Grand Guignol comedy involving a cadaver and an eccentric family reunion - one of those old dark-house thrillers that haunted the West End in the 1920s.

Four characters populate its rooms. The dead patriarch (played by an admirable latex mannequin); his mistress, Sopron (Biddy Wells, evincing all the snugness of a pair of freshly sharpened secateurs), the eldest son, Eff (a pleasingly pompous Justin Avoth) and his younger brother, Istvan (Chris Moran, playing the part like a shifty workhouse boy still reeling from his last strapping).

All three human actors work hard to squeeze variety from the self-consciously repetitious dialogue. (The catchphrase of the night was a three-line description of Sopron's genital area, which a less-tolerant audience might have shouted out after its ninth or 10th airing.)

Not that the play lacks humour. You might laugh when Eff 's murderous sexual fantasies are interrupted by an exchange on dental bleaching - or when one of Sopron's more melodramatic entrances is sabotaged by a line about dry cleaning. But Arsenic and Old Lace has better gags - and it might also be more genuinely experimental.

At Studio 3 until 14 November. Information: 020 8237 1111.

Dead Hands