Trailing clouds of murky symbolism, dripping with grave pretension and oozing vapid absurdities, Mark Ravenhill's 90-minute play rains down upon the Donmar stage with all the appeal of a heavy downpour.
In 1996 Ravenhill found fame with his first full-length piece, Shopping and F******, which caught England's youth - or at least some of them - up to no end of self-abuse, deviant sex and drugs. It was sharp, specific and shocking where The Cut proves soft-edged, vague and obscure.
The setting is some post-Orwellian, authoritarian dystopia of no fixed personality. Paul, the play's symbolic anti-hero, personification of those decent, middle-class civil servants who ensure the wheels of cruelty run smoothly, presides over a machine that inflicts the "Cut" of death. At home, though, he acts the devoted if sexually dysfunctional husband to his sympathetic wife.
The old, familiar question is implicitly posed again. How can a torturer be so sweet a family man? Involved in this pelting nonsense, apart from director Michael Grandage who invests the evening with the hot air of gravity, you will find Sir Ian McKellen.
Sir Ian, who plays the mysterious, significant Paul, dolls himself up with mannered affectations and an arch theatricality teetering too close to camp for bureaucratic comfort.
He hardly looks the type of chap up for torture, especially when Jimmy Akingbola's John, who suffers unspecified spiritual pain, arrives and begs to be cut to pieces. Neither Ravenhill's writing nor Sir Ian's performance offer clues as to how we should interpret this weird satire upon a death-cult and upon the state and the individual locked in sado-masochistic complicity.
"Are you insane?" Paul casually asks John, as if people never arrived asking to be put out of their misery. When he allows himself to be lulled by John into a hypnotic trance of disembodied calm and nothingness, it briefly seems as if the play is heading away from his dystopian world where universities, prisons and the army seem the only focal points of life.
Then Sir Ian relaxes at home with Deborah Findlay's protective wife, Susan, and The Cut changes tack once more. Ravenhill drops and scatters heavy hints to suggest Paul's state of mind and body are mightily disturbed, thanks to his horrifying work duties. Sir Ian loses his cool and weeps a pretty unconvincing tear or two, to no dramatic purpose.
This purposeless intensifies in a final scene, after The Cut regime has been overthrown and Paul's revisionist son visits him in a prison hospital, only to find his father bound to masochistic self-abuse and arguing that history's cyclical tendencies ensure evil will always return. Ravenhill's contentions strike nothing but a blow for the obvious.
Until 1 April (0870 060 6624).
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