HAVEN'T we been here before?

There is the same Roger Glossop set, the one with the lemons in the mini-model supermarket trolley; the same cast names; same playwright; same director and same use of a capital letter midWay through the play's tiTle.

Ah, but I was in a different seat, and phew, the play wasn't called DejaVu, but if Alan Ayckbourn keeps adding to his list with such alacrity, the next one just might be, having already announced an unexpected third new show for the summer, RolePlay: same set, cast, same etc.

This time the luxurious London Docklands apartment is a corporate flat in the name of Joanna Rupleford, who has never been seen, as Annette Sefton-Wilcox (Beth Tuckey), the agent with the snorting, dismissive laugh explains.

On a hot Bank Holiday Monday, Rosie Seymore (Alison Pargeter) must cast her excited eye over the riverside pad in the absence of her uncle, the janitor temporarily off-duty with whiplash.

Rosie is an actress, or actor as she calls herself, whose day takes a downward turn with the phonecall to say she has lost the race to be Jane Eyre in the next big BBC costume drama. She had already stopped smoking, has no money and had no decent sex in six months since her boyfriend walked out on her, so when the handsome stranger from next door, Sam Berryman (Bill Champion), comes bounding in, could her luck be about to change with his offer of cooking supper? He says gnocchi, she thinks nookie, let's open another chapter of Bridget Jones's Diary...

Except nothing is as it seems. Rosie has just told him she's Joanna, and as that FlatSpin title suggests, there are soon to be more spins than a circus plate routine... but not before the sexiest seduction scene Ayckbourn has ever written.

Alison Pargeter had spent her adult career playing children and teenage roles... until now, at 29. From the moment she shakes her blonde mane like Miss Piggy, she is a kitten re-born. Add unbridled cleavage, red wine of dubious origin, and it is like that moment when the librarian takes off her glasses.

Pargeter, however, also brings out the vulnerability in Rosie and it turns out Rosie is not only vulnerable but in danger. Exit Sam, without explanation. Enter the world-weary Maurice Whickett (Robert Austin) and mean and moody lesbian action-girl Tracy Taylor (Saskia Butler), a surveillance team on the tracks of drug-dealing Edna Stricken (Jacqueline King). What follows is a farce dressed as a cat-and-mouse thriller, including a marvellously dim cameo from Tim Faraday as London's thickest surveillance squaddie, Tommy Angel.

Pargeter is a revelation, the play sexy and flirtatious and full of mind and body games. It will have you in a spin.