John David’s production is given little chance by the shallowness of Orton's original text and the absurdity of the play's structure. Maybe this is where Orton saw a joke, but it is a difficult one to sustain for one and a half hours. The play mimics sexual myth from Socrates to modern parapsychology without coming to terms with the concerns of these borrowings. Orton's substitute myth is the rediscovery of the lost phallus of a Churchill statue. In his deconstructionalist terms and in termsof audience sympathy, this phallus should be more powerful than what it comes to replace. Unfortunately it is not. Taste in 1980 is very different to what it was in 1969 at the outraged first production.

The production is not so much itself at fault. Richard Gale makes the best of a badly written psychiatrist. Daniel Webb and Rosumund Shelley are archetypally erotic and energetic. Robert Deins' set fulfils the modest structural demands of the play, as does the autonomy of lighting in the psychiatrist's consulting room. The emergent phallus puts it out - the symbolism is not lost.

However, discourse unrelated to these situational elements betrays a disturbing vacuum. Orton is confused with his defences collapsed. The resort to questionable sexual and psychological epigrams expresses this confusion. He is both under-obsessed and over-obsessed with his theme. Whether sexuality, read as paranoia or joke, is believed to be the only unmoveable assumption, the choice of production belittles the status of the theatregoing population of Watford and north-west London.