What is going on here? This new play by Simon Smith deals in part with the nature of conceptual art. But it is almost impossible to work out whether Smith is satirising the sensation-seeking aspects of modern art or suggesting that creativity knows no frontiers.
Smith's heroine, Wendy Plummer, is a feminist artist first heard giving a radio interview in which she describes her most famous work, which mixed her father's ashes with her own menstrual blood. Improbably, she has been asked to return to her East Midlands birthplace and create a piece of public art celebrating womanhood. But return she does and, having rescued her mother from an old people's home and slept with a local female admirer, she conceives her masterwork: the exhibition of a pickled female corpse in a water tank. The question is who'll supply the body.
Judging by the title, with its obvious Hughes-Plath reference, one half expects a play about the victimised female artist driven to suicide. And part of the time that is what we get, with Wendy portrayed as someone pushed to ever greater artistic extremities by her screwed-up childhood. But since Wendy is also seen as a calculating exhibitionist who is ready to turn her mother's body into an art-object, it is hard to feel sympathy. The artist as victim or vandal? Smith can't make up his mind.
Stepping into the role of Wendy at short notice, Nichola McAuliffe does all she possibly can. At different times, she is watchful, wary, sexy, sad, aggressive and wet, but she finds it difficult to discover what acting textbooks call a "through line" on the part. Danielle Tilley as her admirer, Mary Wimbush as her mother and Susan Brown as a practical carer offer decent support. But it is typical of the incoherence of both the play and Jonathan Church's production that they seek our sympathy for the residents of homes for the elderly and then treat them as little more than set decoration. In the words of the character in Dickens's Hard Times,"Tis aw a muddle."
• Till October 9. Box office: 0171 722 9301.
