Sound and technical managers Cormac O'Connor and Thomas Morrissey and production manager Peter Collins deserve much of the credit for the smooth realisation of a complex stage presentation with Craving, the new play by Johnny Hanrahan and John Browne which opened at the Everyman Palace last Wednesday in a co-production with Meridian Theatre.

A study of obsessions, most vividly realised in a rent boy's relationship with an advertising executive, Craving has a determined contemporary relevance. Like the script, the direction is shared by Hanrahan and Browne in a fusion which isn't always seamless but which is consistently visually challenging, never more so than when the audience watches several different playing areas at once, from video screen to gantry to catwalk.

This isn't just a diversion, but a function of the play itself: the theme concerns advertising, addiction, the simulated compulsions of the marketplace. If this is the message, then the medium is as layered as society has come to expect - but not, as Craving insists, to suspect.

Building the plot around the advertising campaign for a new perfume the Hanrahan/Browne coupling loosens when the sub-plot (the executive's journalist wife hungering both for a headline-swamping story and a baby) is hung rather than linked to the climactic action. The shared direction, like the shared script, leaves some necessary questions unanswered - as in the wife's reaction when she realises that her husband, impotent in her bedroom, is not only out with another blond but that the blond is a boy. It is as if the writers have decided that enigma is as much a resolution as revelation, and the challenging style of the play allows the validity of such a conclusion.

John Browne's music is both background and commentary - and his songs are performed as a lyric counterpoint to the main theme by John Brosnan. As the rent boy, Frank Bourke manages to play for laughs without denying the pathos of the character, but this is a play in which most of the attention is on the machines, with plot lines being exposed in one-sided conversations on the mobile phones. Faxes, modems, camcorders are the stuff of the life shown here - and Alan Gilsenan's filming (and editing?) is tuned to the frenetic signals of a frantic world.

Craving continues at the Everyman Palace until Saturday.