The Author

What's on the theatrical menu tonight - anal rape, stoning a baby, eating one? All three have been on offer at the Royal Court in the past, and Tim Crouch's adroit, reflexive work evokes them once again. Why do writers' imaginations feed on such horrors? Why do we want to watch them enacted? Directors Karl James and a smith weave an interactive conversation around such questions and interrogate the boundaries between life, art and exploitation.

It's audacious and playful. There's no stage: just two banks of spectators facing one another. Seated among them, the cast: Tim Crouch, playing an author called Tim Crouch;Vic Llewellyn and Esther Smith as actors who once appeared in a violent play by 'Tim Crouch'; and Adrian Howells, a theatregoer who saw it. Each speaks about it from their own perspective. There's over-earnest thespian chat about creating a character; we hear how stage blood and animal liver were deployed to create scenes of nauseating brutality, and how real-life human suffering supplied inspiration.

The actors address individual audience members, the lights go on and off, and TV sitcom themes sporadically play. It's by turns compelling, oppressive and - probably deliberately - irksome. And it raises few moral or artistic questions that won't already have occurred to most sensitive makers and consumers of theatre. Yet it is confrontational in its immediacy, discomfiting in its simplicity - a memorable and, for all its self-conscious cleverness, surprisingly potent provocation.