Extra side to the love triangle

The onstage ménage-à-trois is customarily a flower of decadence - think of that trio of bisexual bohos in Coward's Design for Living.

In Steve Trafford' s A Cloud in Trousers - a play extrapolated from the life of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky - the threesome is a logical extension of the abolition of private property.

That, anyway, is the view of Lili Brik (Elizabeth Mansfield), the woman at the apex of this love triangle. If the ownership of inanimate objects is immoral, she reasons, then the ownership of people is doubly so. Her husband,

Osip (Mark Payton), concurs - though he may simply be accepting his cuckoldry with the same questionable pragmatism that has led him to collaborate with the secret police.

For Mayakovsky (John Sackville), the arrangement furnishes good material for his freewheeling verse - just what he needs when his only paid work is formulating jingles for the state condom company. ("Our prophylactics could save the revolution/If every apparatchik was forced to use one.")

The principals make efficient work of these roles. Mansfield's saucer eyes express an earnest devotion to the reorganisation of sexual relations along Marxist lines - without ever suggesting that Lili just wants to have her cake and eat it.

Payton lends Osip an air of shabby dignity even as he disappears to a clandestine meeting at the Lubyanka. Sackville's angular features give his Mayakovsky the appearance of a cubist painting that has leapt from the gallery wall.

All three, however, are comprehensively upstaged by Gilly Tompkins's satisfyingly surly turn as Annushka, their world-weary maidofall-work. As the trio of lovers row about sex under communism and the Sovietisation of art, she does their shopping, saws up furniture for firewood, burns volumes of Tolstoy to keep them all warm and mourns the death of her soldier son. Three's company, sure. But in this case, four is better.

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