We know, from the Gagarin Way and The Straits, that Gregory Burke can write snazzy dialogue. We also know that he's a dab hand at mixing fights of erudition with displays of testosterone. But his third play, co-ordinated by the Court and Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, confirms Burke's gifts without imaginatively extending them.

The action starts in a Scandinavian slammer where two guys are penned up during an English soccer match. The cryptically named H is a glib Mancunian spiv. His cockney cellmate, Daz is a former ex-Marine commando. Having chummed up with the dreamy Daz, H offers to cut him a dodgy deal of supplying false passports to an old Scouse colleague, Ray. But, when the three men finally met up in a blandly luxurious hotel room, we get a triangular power play in which it takes time to deduce who is calling the shots.

In form, the play owes visible debt to Mamet's American Buffalo. In the theme, it derives from Darwin's Origin of The Species. Burke's main point is that in the naturally selective world of petty crime, it's only the biggest sharks that will survive. Even technology is undercutting the livelihood of the small-scale villain: as Ray, a ticket tout ruined by the internet, complains: "You take away a man's fuckin right to manipulate the price and what's he got left?"

You are left admiring the racy chat and some cool performances from Jeff Hordley as the auto-didact Mancunian, Andrew Schofield as the wiry Scouser and Paul Anderson as the deceptive Daz. Matt Wilde's production also orchestrates the action with jazzy effectiveness and Lisa Lillywhite's design has the right Scandinavian sparseness.

Michael Billington

The Guardian - 12th October 2005