Perversely over-priced

If anyone fancies witnessing the wretched, lower depths to which the West End stage frequently sinks these days they could do no better than rush to see David Mamet's elderly play, Sexual Perversity In Chicago.

A topprice seat costs £36, not to mention a £2.50 "handling charge", whatever that means, for 75 minutes' playing time. And what a low-grade time it proves, despite three American or American-based film stars, Matthew Perry, Minnie Driver and Hank Azaria deigning to try their luck upon the London stage before the next movie beckons.

Sexual Perversity now seems a dreary, dated collection of snippety scenes and theatrical snap-shots of young Americans having a shot at seduction and sex and missing. West End theatre bargains do not come much more expensive or more resistible than this.

The acting ranges from the barely competent to the goodish. But all the players look at least a vital 10 years too old for their roles. Mamet's sex-obsessed characters all sound and behave as if they are late teenagers or in their early twenties. Matthew Perry, in particular, not only acts with a self-conscious touch which is as heavy as a grasp, but looks almost old enough to play his character's Daddy.

So is it not high time producers scaled down this heavy traffic of Hollywood movie stars to the London stage and stopped trying to seduce us into theatres with mere razzle-dazzle? The best of American stars who have serious theatre ambitions must be encouraged to work over here. But producers should stop palming us off with third-rate plays that they believe can be decorated with any youngish, film-starry Americans.

Mamet's status as a major American playwright stands firm, but Sexual Perversity should never have been much more than a series of tentative sketches for an American Seventies TV soap opera. Thirty years ago when the sexual revolution was still in its nappies, free contraception remained a novelty and women's liberationists were in the first flush of freedom Mamet's quartet of would-be fornicators may have looked daring. It is different now. Director Lindsay Posner has hit upon an enraging idea of how to present Mamet's brief, film-like scenes. Instead of using a bare playing-area with a composite set, designer Jeremy Herbert uses stage shutters, with on-stage recesses serving as performance spaces. A curtain of photo-montages comes down between every scene, often for far too long, breaking any continuity achieved.

A vague plot involves Matthew Perry's office manager, Danny, who attempts to have a live-in relationship with Deborah, played with real conviction by attractive Kelly Reilly. It does not work and Danny ends as he began, taking part in dirty sex-talk and greedily gawping at girls with Hank Azaria's buoyantly aggressive, self-confident Bernard.

Minnie Driver looks at ease on stage and elegantly delivers stinging put-downs as a girl disappointed by sex and love. She wears a face that looks as if it has settled down with disappointment. "Don't torture me," she says in a voice so weary that you feel it ought to have been put to bed hours ago.

There are some witty, astute observations. But eventually the straggling sex-talk and repartee, with black-outs intermitting, left me longing to be left in the dark and pestered no more.

Sexual Perversity In Chicago