Men behaving sadly

After Cloaca at the Old Vic, Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder's Fresh Kills offers another rummage in the feculent scrag bin of modern male sexuality.

The scenario she has concocted is full of nasty possibilities. Her protagonist, Eddie (Phil Daniels), is a builder from Staten Island with a battered pick-up, a sceptical wife (Nicola Walker), a young son - and a secret online relationship with a mop-haired 16-year-old named Arnold (Matt Smith).

Director Wilson Milam has permitted his designer, Ultz, to fill the tiny stage with Eddie's truck, its taillights blazing into the eyes of the audience. What might have been a dreary obstacle becomes an opportunity for imaginative choreography - and the masking effect that occurs when the actors climb into the cab adds useful verisimilitude to the sex scenes.

The small details are more convincing than the bigger picture. Wilder is particularly good at postcoital wrangling: the opening minutes, played with delicate skill by Daniels and Walker, allow a cosy scene of fellatio to yield to a row about cash. It is a subtle indictment of the play's central marriage.

But Eddie's emotions - which ought to be the burning heart of this play - are perversely illegible, forcing Daniels to spend most of the time labouring under a mask of fretful confusion.

Oddly, Eddie betrays little cognisance of the weak position in which his infidelity has placed him. He goads Arnold when you'd think he'd be appeasing him - and when he is offered the opportunity to renounce the affair, chooses instead to invite the boy back into the family home for a bout of thick-eared dramatic irony. (Eddie's wife Marie, of course, coos over her husband's lover: "You are so handsome.")

Perhaps this is an attempt to create a bluecollar, Hudson River version of Oscar Wilde's fatalistic refusal to check out of the Cadogan Hotel and hop on the boat to Dieppe to escape the authorities. If so, it is communicated with insufficient energy. Eddie's recklessness seems less a product of his own desires and more a consequence of the playwright's need to accelerate the action towards a final - and unnecessarily melodramatic - bust-up.

No wonder Phil Daniels looks so confused.

Until 20 November. Information: 020 7565 5000.

Fresh Kills