Excesses block Cloaca's potential

Kevin Spacey launches his regime as the Old Vic's artistic director with what amounts to a bleak whimper of discontent. Cloaca is the Latin word for a waste-pipe that carries away sewage. This superlatively-acted though unexciting tragi-comedy by Dutch playwright Maria Goos lives up to its metaphoric title by allowing four fortyish middle-class males, friends from way back, to discharge no end of emotional waste about the stage.

Stephen Tompkinson's withdrawn Pieter, a gay council bureaucrat in big trouble at work, finds himself besieged by three old friends who deposit their problems in his care and sumptuous loft apartment.

Thanks to Hugh Bonneville's Jan, a politician with Cabinet ambitions whose marriage has hit several large rocks, Adrian Lukis's Tom, a coke-addicted lawyer reliant on Lithium since going out of his mind in Spain, and Neil Pearson's Maarten, an egotistical avant-garde director whose latest production is about to premiere, the cloacal channels run fast and furious, though not very funny.

If only this cleansing and confessional process had involved some dramatic or amusing conflict. If only Goos had halted this parade of men eager to air grievances, speak their minds and display bleeding hearts. She cannot directly know how men without women around behave and her males have unconvincing aspects because they exchange intimacies and tell home truths in a style more typical of women.

The fact that the four friends, whose shared past is given scant mention, see their various, sweet hopes of love, fame and happiness turn sour within days, helps intrude a note of contrivance. Fate works with a little more selective subtlety.

At least the griping petulance of Bonneville's unpleasant politician who, unwilling to bear domestic chaos at home has walked out on his wife, remains a brilliantly observed comic study of ruthlessness under pressure. In a bewildering style of extremity, Goos makes all her men variations on a single theme. They are either sexually incompetent or retired from the erotic fray. These fellows can scarcely manage an erection between them. Pearson's Maarten, admitting what most men would hug to themselves, confesses he is impotent, except with Jan's 17-yearold actress daughter.

The chaps hire Ingeborga Dapkunaite's impassioned foreign prostitute for Jan. The politician, unable to rise to the occasion, prefers, in clichéd fashion, to confess his tearful memories of his daughter's birth to a girl who cannot even speak his language. Tompkinson's sympathetic Pieter, threatened with legal action for taking home discarded pictures that have since become valuable, has abandoned all hope of sex: this downcast, doomed character, isolated from gay life, is so outdated he would have far better fitted into a queer problem drama 30 years ago.

Cloaca is too packed with hectic extravagances and excesses. Goos, it is true, acutely exposes some male vulnerabilities and limitations. But her characters do not bear the full stamp of conviction. Spacey's jumpy production, hampered by its awkward blackouts and blasts of rock music, is energised by the actors. Lukis's strangely affecting Tom flails around in sequences of manic energy while Tompkinson's Pieter drifts with quiet pathos towards the terrible harbour of despair. These two almost flush out Cloaca's partially blocked potential.

Cloaca