Black look at anger management

Kay Adshead's Animal asks - like Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange - whether the impulse to violence can be controlled scientifically, focusing on a female doctor whose aggro-phobia has inspired experiments with a drug that might promote world peace.

Where Burgess's novel was very much a child both of the Cold War and of Augustinian issues of free will, Animal looks at a science-controlled future more in tune with contemporary paranoias, as it investigates how chemical weapons could redefine personality and destroy the desire to fight.

Adshead won rave reviews for her powerful, well researched play about an asylum seeker, The Bogus Woman. Animal is equally well researched, but it buckles under the weight of its issues.

Written - astonishingly - before London's record-beating anti-war protest, it looks at how a mass demonstration for world peace contrasts with sinister, government-led efforts to eliminate anti-social aggression - drug-based attempts, which, the playwright warns in her introduction, are gaining growing currency with today's politicians.

Animal takes three characters: Dr Lee (Fiona Bell), a scientist whose personality could have come straight out of a bottle marked antiseptic, Pongo (Richard Owens), her previously homeless patient who has an anger problem and a worrying appetite for swan flesh, and Elmo (Mark Monero), a male nurse whose rampant obsession with tit and pussy has nothing to do with the animal world.

Uniformly provocative performances are not enough, however, to redeem a play that is refreshingly ambitious, yet maddeningly short on the detail and the specificity needed to bring spice to a dramatic debate about scientific meddling and the role of violence in the human condition.

Issues of gender and love pop intriguingly above the surface before being drowned in dramatic ambivalence. Perhaps appropriately, this feels like an unexploded bomb of a play.

Animal