IT cannot be coincidence that the word sex ends in ex, so often is it finite.

The Blue Room is full of sexual encounters - of the brief and de-brief kind - that turn in on each other as all roads lead to roam.

Love has gone AWOL - absent without love - as sex becomes the be all and end all in a graphic play about desire, imagination and experience involving The Girl and The Cab Driver; The Cab Driver and the Au Pair; The Au Pair and The Student... you get the revolving picture.

Sex, not love, makes the world go round.

Perhaps lust had blinded a swooning London when Nicole Kidman took off her kit in the Donmar Warehouse premiere in 1998 because The Blue Room does not live up to great sexpectations - and that is not a comment on there being less nudity than the teasing interviews had saucily suggested, although we do have plenty of arse in The Blue Room to complement the ass in A Midsummer Night's Dream this autumn.

For all David Hare's reputation as the great thinker of modern British playwrights, his freely-adapted modernisation of Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde fails to throw perceptive new light on the nation's number one obsession, and an increasing obsession at that, as a flick through any Sunday tabloid reveals.

Maybe the problem is the monotony of all conversations leading to the same conclusion - Shut up and kiss me - like a series of gags all ending with the same punchline. Maybe it is that we are presented with caricatures not characters, in particular the absurdly- outmoded Aristocrat (James Garnon), in a staccato series of episodic scenes, cast adrift on too big a stage. Or maybe it is that Lucy Pitman-Wallace and Damian Cruden's production is heavier in tone than it should be: the comedy needs cranking up.

Katherine Kelly is a young talent to watch; Malcolm Skates plays the pompous Politician more convincingly than the vainglorious Playwright and Andrina Carroll finds multiple ways to wrap herself in a sheet to avoid a flash of flesh.

All in all, a frustrating night, but that's sex for you.

Box office: 01904 623568