Brace for impact. Hampstead Theatre has become a debauched nightclub for sleazemongers on Red Bull.
Tarell Alvin McCraney's stab at restoration comedy slaps street slang into baroque excess to make a greasy neon soup and the result is a frenetic assault on the senses that comes at you like a poke in the eye from Sid James.
The story, such as it is, centres on Tunji Kasim's light-on-his-feet rent boy Pharus who flees his New York hip hop sugar daddy for a plum job at his aunt's PR firm in London.
On the way he accrues an entourage of immigrant grotesques who come to rely on him for their betterment.
But he cannot escape his past and the lure of a quick buck and fumble derails his ambition.
Meanwhile, a power struggle at the PR agency leaves sharp-tongued Valentina (Sophie Russell) picking up the pieces of a D-lister's clash with the press.
But it's all surface shine and played for laughs with pointless scenes salvaged from backs of envelopes and tossed into the mix for effect rather than balance.
It's as though McCraney - given the RSC to play with - wants to see what he can make them do, like the kid who taps 58008 into his calculator to get teacher to say "boobs".
But it's played with gusto and eye bulging, last-day-of-term relish by guys who knows what it takes to sell a line.
Veterans such as Geoffrey Freshwater and Sheila Reid cast care (and clothes) to the wind for some lascivious romping against the graffiti'd backdrop while Debbie Korley as Super Girl almost steals the show with a two-minute turn as a typical TfL gloom-monger.
Nothing gets too deep, and despite the flesh on show, no characters emerge and after about 15 minutes the realisation that it's never gonna stop is an epiphany of soul-sapping enormity.
– From June 2011
