The young director Stephen Henry has an absolute genius for attracting publicity, but so far in his short career there is no evidence whatsoever that he has the slightest talent for picking a good new play. Two years ago in Edinburgh, the pickets and tabloid press were out in force for his premiere of Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi, a limp and entirely inoffensive attempt to depict Jesus as gay.
His latest effort, written by James Martin Charlton, has already had acres of newsprint devoted to it because it features a child actor in a story about paedophiles, pimps and snuff movies. Ecstasy and Grace is only shocking because it fails to address the issue of paedophilia with any purpose, insight or honesty, and only newsworthy because it falls into the category of those ball-crunching, back-breaking nights that Richard Eyre recently identified as giving the theatre such a bad name. Apparently, the police have paid the theatre a visit but the only arrests that seem likely are for boring the audience to death.
In fact, Ecstasy and Grace turns out to be a laughingly improbable, badly made, excruciating and sadly-written drama about spiritual death and rebirth. Davy used to be a leading light in the Salvation Army but after the general's 18-year-old son rejected his advances, he scarpered to Amsterdam. Now he is shacked up with Kai, a German neo-Nazi. Together they run a gay porn shop and procure drugs and teenage boys for greasy English perverts who claim that all they are doing is "loving boys". But when 13-year-old Pullet is killed by a client who takes the view that as he's paid for the boy he can do what he likes with him, and film it too, Davy suddenly finds his conscience.
The absurdity of Charlton's play is that we're supposed to believe that it has never crossed Davy's mind that Pullet might be in danger; its gratuitousness is that it treats a subject as serious as paedophilia merely as plot device as Davy undergoes his transformation from cynical businessman trading in flesh to born again Sally Army recruit.
The final 15 minutes, which feature serious reference to Rolf Harris's Two Little Boys song and a spiritual duel between the half-naked Salvation Army follower Rae and the all too easily convinced Davy, is actually rather memorable. But only because it is so loopy.
• Until March 31. Box office: 020-7373 3842.
