BEAUTIFUL People is a London drama making its debut in Scarborough. Nothing wrong with a capital setting for East Coast entertainment: only last year Alan Ayckbourn's Damsels In Distress trilogy took place in a Docklands flat.

The star-glitter presence of Stephen Beckett, latterly the hunky doctor in Coronation Street, and Coupling star Gina Bellman suggests a hot new play. Likewise, the languorous lean legs and flash of underwear beside a desk-top computer on the programme cover announce that Neil Monaghan's Beautiful People will be sexy theatre about people on the knife edge of the City.

Here is a tale of power, greed and lack of morality, of champagne, whisky and dope, of risk, manipulation and the dot.com economy, with sex and money as both the oxygen and carbon monoxide of City life today. Just as it was in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband in 1895 and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money in 1987.

Bellman, whose first dress must have been painted on to her slender frame, is JJ, a one-time escort girl who has turned freelance to conduct insider-trading stings in tandem with boyfriend Leo Harper (Beckett), a disgraced City trader now running his one-man bandit scams from his flat.

They are the Bonnie & Clyde of the Square Mile: he spots the chances for insider deals; she targets businessmen on the cusp of selling out their companies, offering her body in exchange for gifts, last-minute trips abroad, glamorous companionship at exhibition openings, book launches and parties and no hassle.

Latest target is slimy big fish Tony Skelton (Joseph Bennett), whose marriage had been easier to destroy than save. He takes up JJ's services but wants to know more about her from her best friend Amber (Eleanor Tremain), a television producer with treatments gathering dust and a conviction she is past it at 28.

"Are you happy," JJ asks Skelton in a hotel room. "Happy?", he ponders. "God knows". No, these are not happy people but lost, fragile souls; all fear ever younger rivals, all want a change for the better but the devil will lead them on their Faustian routes. Only Barclay (John Lightbody), a cynical Mancunian campaigner for free trade encountered by JJ on a Highbury park bench, is interested in improving the world.

Bellman's brittle JJ, the laser-beam precision of Edward Kemp's direction and the shards of black humour in Monaghan's caustic dialogue are but three reasons to see this incisive expos of London life as a form of capital punishment.

Box office: 01723 370541

Updated: 12:25 Wednesday, October 16, 2002