Scraping the bottom

Rumpy pumpy - or, at least - pumping a rump has never seemed so painful, in a play that starts with a bang and speedily descends into a protracted, tedious whimper. The scenario sounds ripe with bawdy potential - boy meets woman, boy gets woman, they have anal sex, he gets stuck and calls on his gynaecologist father to help separate them - but in fact it just feels like a nasty case of anus horribilis.

When Sir Peter Hall first directed this play at The Gate in 2000, he reflected that a piece about anal sex under a parachute would certainly have been censored 40 years previously by the Lord Chamberlain. It would be wonderful to report that Britain is a better place for staging Giuseppe Manfridi's drama, yet - in a theatrical year that has witnessed a Macbeth involving necrophilia and cunnilingus, and the show XXX employing orgasm machines, a Shetland pony and clingfilm to explode the boundaries of sex in theatre - Cuckoos proves neither shocking nor entertainingly provocative.

The play opens in semi-darkness, on a raised stage that designer Lucy Hall has carefully constructed as a claustrophobic nightmare. A low ceiling, dingy walls, a picture of a topless woman, and a tiny model aeroplane provide the backdrop for the extraordinary sight of Jessica Turner as Beatrice, and Mark Rice-Oxley as Tito, crawling in as a very embarrassed

beast with two backs.

Apparently they are in search of a parachute to cover both their blushes and their bodies, because Beatrice has spurned Tito's dirty linen, even though she is currently the most embarrassing item in his closet.

David Yelland's entrance as

Tobia, Tito's father, provokes a series of jokes and complex revelations - oh that it were possible to give a damn.

Physical extremes may shock, but they are ultimately no more than a zoological fact - it is only in certain social and psychological contexts that they gain enduring tragic or comic resonance in theatre.

In his introduction to Colin Teevan's translation, Sir Peter refers to alternative theatrical examples of agonised physicality such as Oedipus displaying his empty eye-sockets - yet Sophocles made Oedipus emotionally and politically real, and it is only because of that reality that we are moved.

It is a far anguished cry from this silly contrived piece where the characters seem like pawns, and the action sub-porn. Despite its esteemed director, theatregoers would be advised to give Cuckoos the bird.

Until 12 July. Box office: 0845 120 7550.

Cuckoos