What is Patrick Marber up to in Howard Katz? Is he telling the story of a modern Jewish Everyman? Or is he attacking a cynical, faithless, materialist age? Possibly both. But although the play is full of snazzy one-liners, Marber's dual aims come into increasing collision as the action unfolds.

Marber starts with the abortive suicide of the hero and then backtracks to trace the source of his despair. In the racy first half we learn that Howard, a barber's son, is an unusually rebarbative showbiz agent who tells his clients the blistering truth. "You're like a skull on a stick," he informs one face-lifted actress. But gradually the rich, clever but hollow Howard loses his wife, alienates his father and is relieved of his business. We then watch his life spiralling downwards as he is rejected by everyone, gambles away his remaining money, and apostrophises an uncaring God like a traumatised Tevye the Milkman.

In both Dealer's Choice and Closer, Marber showed a mature understanding of urban solitude. But here it is hard to work out whether Howard's problems are individual or social. At one moment Marber implies that Howard, whose father guiltily confesses to an affair, is the victim of collapsing Jewish family values and orthodox faith: "You never believed anything," his father tells him, "so you don't know who you are." But at other times Marber implies that it is impossible to be good in our corrupt world, where TV gardeners and chefs are revered as secular icons.

I suspect that, unconsciously, Marber is trying to write a modern Death of a Salesman; but, unlike Miller, he never establishes a molten link between his hero's private flaws and the false dreams imposed by society. So one is left to take what pleasure one can in some sharp showbiz satire and odd zingers such as Howard's remark to his wife: "Your capacity for happiness can be very depressing."

Ron Cook lends the hero the right mix of abrasiveness, ebullience and self-loathing. And in Marber's own production, played in the Cottesloe Theatre on a fast-moving revolve, with the actors assuming multiple roles, there is good support from Trevor Peacock as Howard's essentially decent dad, and from Mossie Smith as his cultured wife. The play is never dull, but leaves one feeling that Marber follows too many paths on the way to Howard's end.

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