Love with the metrosexuals

Urban homosexuals, practising metrosexuals and heterosexuals consenting to liberality should be substantially amused by Samuel Adamson's satirical take on gay manners and morals in trendy London parts today.

Anyone, though, searching for a play of substance ought to look elsewhere. The potentially serious aspect, referring to the reunion of chaps once involved in illicit teenage buggery, is diffused in situation comedy and laughter.

By choice of title, Adamson invites misleading comparison with Ben Jonson's fairground play, Bartholomew Fair, in which some heterosexual traders find the price of vice excessive. Adamson's comedy, more concerned with romance and sexual ties that fail to bind, is different in form and treatment.

Giles Cadle's inadequate, tattily non-descript sets, with anonymous black-and-white back-cloths, and a realistic Thames Embankment wall, scarcely manage to summon up Southwark locations.

Here, during a single day, six young, or youngish, people are variously brought together in flirtations and heavily contrived circumstances, before drifting apart.

The glorious Margaret Tyzack, blazing with eccentricity and quirky gusto as a neglected actress, looks on. Nicholas Hytner's superlatively acted production milks the comic potential while muting the mood of the romantic-pastoral finale.

I relished Adamson's mordant, comedic flair and his imaginative vulgarity. These characteristics show to best advantage at a hilariously malevolent lunch encounter between two old flames that goes up in smoke.

Rory Kinnear's impressive, doleful IT analyst Simon has bunked off work to meet his first love-object, Con O'Neill's bisexual Irish author Patrick, with whom he had sex, aged just 14.

So little for Simon's romantic memories. O'Neill's lovely, foul-mouthed performance conveys the sexual disappointment of someone who has confused names and selected the wrong man to meet again.

Michael Legge's cute Canadian waiter, hopelessly waiting to be civilly partnered that day to Rhashan Stone's devious, fictitious Deputy Mayor of London, becomes caught up in the erotic tangles. So, too, does the unconvincing character of Patrick's jealousy-obsessed wife - a singer-guitarist who has lost a hand - and a not very funny Australian seller of bird-whistles.