Rent is Friends with heroin, gender identity issues, Aids and loud rock music. Not surprisingly, its appeal is almost entirely to the under-30s, which is no bad thing at the Prince of Wales, a theatre whose antique seating arrangements require fully grown adults to kneecap themselves on the way in if they actually want to sit down.

Inspired by La Bohème, this depiction of teeming life on New York's Lower East Side became an instant cult hit when it opened on Broadway in 1996. This is despite the fact that the plot is so underdeveloped, and relationships so scanty, that you have to read the programme to follow what is happening and find out who is or has been shagging whom. A Venn diagram would have been very useful.

At the risk of being swamped by hate mail, I can't help pointing out that Rent's creator, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly, aged 35, hours before the first preview, and this probably helped its cause enormously. Dying is an extreme but effective way to get noticed in an overcrowded profession, and on such things are theatrical legends made.

Certainly Larson was not above using death shamelessly. Not since Charles Dickens has a writer been so acutely aware that when things are in need of livening up, you can't go wrong with a prolonged, sentimental death scene. The second act of Rent offers not just one, but two deathbed scenes, as well as a sudden miracle cure for Aids that the drug companies have so far been unable to patent. It is, of course, called love.

The curious thing about Rent and Paul Kerryson's energetic production is that they sell themselves on gritty realism while still promoting trite and phoney Broadway values, delivered by glossy haired, high-kicking actors pretending to be half-dead heroin addicts. Given how little she wears it is no surprise that Mimi gets hypothermia.

In some ways the old-fashioned, fake-smiles posturing of shows such as Kiss Me Kate seems more honest than this emotionally manipulative and undistinguished evening.

· Until January 26. Box office: 020-7839 5972.