How to be an Other Woman

Identical beige raincoats hang on shiny steel racks, above neat rows of shoes. Sales clerks, wearing tight black pencil skirts, crisp white shirts and impermeable expressions of politely smiling disdain, busy themselves among the expensive attire. Lorrie Moore's wry 1985 short story, as adapted and directed by Natalie Abrahami, is a chic, snappy game of dress-up that draws on noirish imagery to explore notions of identity and betrayal in a sexual relationship.

Enacted by the four shopgirls, who take turns to become a mac-clad young New Yorker and her trilby-sporting married lover, its playfulness is an apt metaphor for the dodges, feints and double-talk of early-stage romance. The anonymous boutique setting also points up the false comfort of consumerism, and fashion's empty but alluring promise to change the wearer's life. It's smart and Moore's writing is sometimes striking, but Abrahami's production is almost clinically detached.

As the coat racks whirl and the actors move in neatly choreographed formation, we learn of the dispiriting cycle of the heroine's dead-end involvement. Perched on public toilets and obsessing over her status as mistress, she becomes 'a strange flesh sundae of despair and exhilaration'; rifling through the closet of the wife she's never met, she finds footwear 'like small cruise missiles'. The language is vivid, pin-sharp; the staging less so, the initial novelty of its imagery, in designs by Samal Blak, wearing off. Still, Faye Castelow, Samantha Pearl, Ony Uhiara and Cath Whitefield are nimble performers, and if it's a little too coolly clever, it delivers piercing jabs of uncomfortable truth.