Rabbit is a dog's dinner

Picking an easy target - the way parents mess you up - and frequently missing, young Australian playwright Brendan Cowell's Rabbit is a dog's dinner of a black comedy that never quite decides whether it wants to tickle our fancies or go bloodily for the jugular.

Still, it takes some guts to do a play about cancer, heroin addiction and the ultimate futility of life for laughs. And while Cowell might not have much new to say on the big issues, he has got a sharp ear for the tart one-liner. Add that to a lively Frantic Assembly production, a great modernist set and some of the worst white-boy rapping you'll ever hear and Rabbit is never less than diverting.

Middle-class Madeline (Helen Heaslip) is cheesed off at the life of privilege her Dad, Paul Cave (David Sibley), a Right wing radio star, has inflicted on her. She rebels by declaring she wants to be a rap star, to which end she's hooked up with junkie DJ Spin, a character interpreted as the bastard offspring of Eminem and Dale Winton by a scene-stealing Sam Crane.

Spin's comic interventions are more interesting than the tedious end-of-life crisis Cowell inflicts on his dying star, a character we've seen before.

In the real world, Spin would have ditched the whingeing Madeline and been seduced by the Mrs Robinson advances of the vampish Mrs Cave in an instant - and we'd all have had more fun.

Rabbit