In the middle of Terry Hughes's new play, a man is forced face-down into a bowl of dog food. It's an appropriate image for a play that from the outset seeks to rub your nose in it.

Hughes's breakthrough piece, Life's a Gatecrash, picked up a stack of fringe awards and travelled as far as Brazil. That raises hopes for the follow-up, presented by the author's own Manchester-based theatre company, Hit and Run. In the event, I might have preferred to help the hero finish off his Pedigree Chum if it was likely to get the experience over with any faster. And that was before the man was force-fed a bottle of urine and left slavering over a pile of freshly butchered body parts.

Behind Closed Doors is the kind of theatrical experience that demands an open mind and an empty stomach. It might have made more impact were the writing as fresh as the carnage, but Hughes is never afraid to use one cliche where three will do. "You're an itch I can't scratch, a skin I can't shed, a stain I can't rub off," leers the heroine, as she prepares to settle a few old scores with a smarmy advertising executive who has fatally confused the concepts of "no" and "yes".

The model for this revenge thriller might appear to be the macabre mayhem of Jacobean drama; indeed, the concluding scenario looks curiously like Hamlet addressing Yorick in a polythene bag. But the trick of the 17th-century dramatists was to invent a verbal music to sound the depths of moral depravity. Hughes's dialogue is never lithe enough to keep pace with his taste for grotesque stage business.

The actors do what they can with abstractions labelled "Man" and "Woman". Due to the complexities of the plot, it is almost impossible to decipher how many women Woman is supposed to be - but by the time she launches into a risible expressionist ballet sequence of lust and revenge, it is difficult to care.

· Until Saturday. Box office: 0161-274 0600.