GORDON Steel's comic style is the gritcom: nitty gritty comedies from northern working-class stock.

Love and loneliness, lust and trust, friends and family, life and death have been the meat in his curled-up sandwiches in Dead Fish, Studs and Albert Nobbs.

Kissing Married Women ticks the boxes marked lust and loneliness, as the Teesside writer-director joins the dating game...with his least successful results.

Meet Daft Dave (Graham Martin). He has the body of puny Mr Muscle, he has never had sex, let alone a girlfriend, and he needs to break his duck. So Micky (Jason Furnival), his equally work-shy best mate from a house clearance company, has the master plan of reinventing him as a gigolo.

Dave, a simple soul who uses the word Palestine when he means philistine, is all talk and no trouser.

By comparison, Micky has sought distraction from his stultifying marriage, but neither of these bantering lads is the brightest spark in the matchbox, and the masterplan is sure to hit the rocks.

Those rocks were located previously in British sex farces of the Seventies, and in the tradition of Confessions and Carry On capers, hapless Dave stumbles into trouble with assorted horny women (all played by Emma Ashton in gaudy caricatures). A husband returns early, Dave has to dress up as Elvis; it all seems contrived, straining at the leash for laughs, and Steel is usually better than this.

He writes and directs with his familiar liking for short and sharp scenes, but it takes a long time, too long, for his customary shocks to jolt the flow of pub-standard jokes. Dave reveals a secret from his past; Micky's deepest wish and despair is suddenly exposed, and Dave's crush, Carole (the one believable role for Ashton) crushes both men in the play's best scene.

Two images best sum up Kissing Married Women.

Micky adds Viagra to a bottle of Lucozade, and later overcooks and indeed burns a meal he is preparing for Dave's lunchtime date with Carole. Steel's drama, alas, has the properties of both that bottle and meal.

Kissing Married Women, Hull Truck Theatre, Hull, until February 19; box office: 01482 323638. Pocklington Arts Centre, April 26, 7.30pm; 01759 301547.

Updated: 11:32 Wednesday, February 02, 2005