Kim is great in bed

Kim Cattrall spending two hours on her back might suggest she hasn't travelled far from her role as man-eating Samantha in Sex And The City. But in Brian Clark's play Whose Life Is It Anyway, Cattrall's time in a bed is for a very different reason: her character, Claire Harrison, is paralysed after a road accident.

It is one of the toughest roles for stage performers because, unable to move from the neck down, they become, literally, "a talking head".

And at Cattrall's first public performance, there was a definite sense of anticipation in the theatre. Could an actress best known for her vampish TV persona carry off a heavyweight theatre role?

The first thing you notice is that Cattrall looks great. Even though she's immobilised in a hospital bed, she appears just as attractive as she does on the small screen - which is a little odd, as her character is supposed to have suffered horrific injuries and be in a state of depression. Yet she looks surprisingly like a glamorous TV star. (Or, perhaps, not so surprisingly . . .)

Sex And The City followers will also note that just like Samantha, Cattrall's stage character loves everything about men - "the way they look, the smell of them" - and one of the reasons she is so upset by her paralysis is that she will lose out on male attention. She makes repeated references to sex and flirts outrageously, just like Samantha (albeit here laced with black humour).

Cattrall's voice is, naturally, the same as on TV, as are many of the inflections in her speech. So when a doctor examines her, and Cattrall's character demands: "Do you like my breasts?" it is easy to think, "How Samantha!" - and be reminded of the Sex And The City character's defiant reaction to breast cancer.

But then the similarities start to fall away. Cattrall can't flounce, pout or wiggle. Plus, there are no glittering fashions to help her - she spends the entire time in a hospital smock.

And while there are funny lines, this drama is not fast and snappy. It is wordy and worthy, based around the paralysed woman's demand to be allowed to die. The first half dragged, Cattrall seemed too strident at times, and there was a general hesitancy. But, after the interval, things improved greatly.

The play is about arguments. They are good arguments, eloquently put; but there's a lot of them. Which is one of the things that made Cattrall's performance remarkable. She has a staggering amount of lines to work through, but she delivered them conspicuously well. I know that praising a performer for remembering the words is a bit like applauding them for not walking into the furniture, but Cattrall has to carry the show, and she did it almost without faltering.

There is a theory that TV actors underact on stage because their expressions - normally aimed at the close-up eye of the television camera - are not theatrical enough to reach out into an auditorium. But there are no such worries with Cattrall. Even though the role means she has very little room for manoeuvre, Cattrall still manages to fill the theatre, both with her physical presence and her voice.