`After 26 years of marriage," bemoans Sylvia, "what have I got to show for it except the ironing and him." "Him" is her unemployed, layabout husband Eddie, who needs her assistance in everything, even locating the remote control. Her son Darren, having learned his lethargy from his sloth-like father, isn't much better and Sylvia despairs for the life in which she is the breadwinner, cook, nurse, nanny and sole source of optimism. However, when one of Darren's mates accidentally brings home a Chippendales' video, she has a vision of the future.

Sound familiar? Like the film that inspired it, Michael Rattigan's play assumes, not unreasonably perhaps, that the only reason people take their clothes off in public for money is poverty. Yet that assumption is left unchallenged and, worse, unexplored by a script that serves only a tangential role to the real business of the evening: the lads getting their kit off. Never mind the plight of the emasculated male looking for a role in a society where he is surplus to the labour force requirements, roll out the pantomime pastiche, smutty slapstick, gyrating hips, pelvic thrusts and whip us up another facile dance routine. Subtlety? Seduction? Style? Technique? Who has time for these things when five young men are prepared to bare all again (and again). However, unless pulsating pectorals, bare buttocks and suggestive manoeuvres with police truncheons are all you look for in a good night's entertainment, The Real Monty has very little to recommend it. Less strip, more tease please.