Mad, sad and bowel obsessed

Jonathan Swift's tightly satirical mind famously obsessed itself with matters ranging from the scatological to the sacrosanct. The man who at the height of his career was Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, was also happy to display a Rabelaisian smut in poems such as The Lady's Dressing Room, and in its latest production, Group K embraces both these aspects in an absurdist take on Swift's life.

When I went to review Group K's Kristendom three years ago, I walked out halfway through, nauseated by its unswallowable cocktail of pretension and arrogance.

Presto - or the Secret Life of Swift and Gulliver does have its self-regarding moments, but this is an entertainingly provocative - if slightly shapeless - piece that dances tangentially around questions of Swift's declining self-esteem and looming madness.

The audience walks in to see the actor Mat Fraser seemingly asleep on a large heap of oddly shaped cushions, which on closer inspection, mass together to form a huge brain. The action is set on the night prior to a tribunal Swift must face to assess his sanity, and as the play starts, this huge, cushion-built brain starts to heave and fall apart while four individuals in white coats crawl out from its crevices to examine the beleaguered dean and his disintegrating mind.

Over the next hour and a half, these actors metamorphose into different characters as the action sweeps up Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal (Swift's notorious essay recommending the eating of babies) and details of his obsession with Esther Johnson, whom he referred to as Stella. As Swift, Fraser - who is phocomelic, or born with stunted arms - evokes a selfdoubting, bowel-obsessed, lonely figure, overwhelmed by hallucinatory flashbacks to earlier literary successes.

Inevitably, Presto will make the most sense to those with an intimate knowledge of Swift's texts and of the way that figures, including Dr Johnson and Camille Paglia, have responded to them. A depiction of Lilliput using a torch, tiny plasticine figures and a couple of trestles is one of the highlights of an evening that wears its learned irreverence with a pride that only occasionally tilts towards hubris.

Until 23 November. Box office: 020 8237 1111.

The Secret Life Of Swift And Gulliver