UNPROTECTED SEX

Sherman Theatre, Cardiff

Patrick Jones' first play - Everything Must Go - was a sweeping indictment of everything that is wrong with 1990s Wales, from drugs to Japanese microprocessor factories. With Unprotected Sex, Jones has abandoned such a broad canvas to produce a chamberpiece of pain which explores the anguish lurking behind the familiar phrase "boys don't cry". It is a study of the agonies suffered by Gary (Richard Harrington), a tough-talking soldier who privately writhes in the excruciations of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Tormented by the sights he has seen in Kosovo, his training in the school of masculine hidden emotion leaves him unable to communicate his inner suffering to his pregnant wife Triste (Maria Pride). The violence and repression has left Gary so disassociated that the only way that he can feel connected to the world is through the sock on the jaw and blood in the mouth of a punch-up. Jones reinterprets the Saturday night scrap as the desperate attempts of men submerged in a culture of repressed feeling and glorified brutality to achieve some sense of reality.

Dancing around and behind the sparring couple is Denver (Oliver Ryan), a gibbering gnome of memory, a stream of consciousness made flesh chanting out the unspoken angst of traditional masculinity. He intersperses this cascade of raw emotion with a tale of two ponies, "together like two old lovers outside Tescos". When this twisted Welsh Chorus is transformed, midway through the play, into the weirdo who lives in the flat above the couple, it offers some relief from the nebulous monosyllabic arguments between Gary and Triste. Yet it also chips away some of Denver's detachment and mystique. The story of the ponies, which up to now seemed mythical and parabolic, is suddenly placed into a grimy and drably mundane frame. It loses some of its potency through an apparent unwillingness on Jones' part to leave dissonant and disassociated parts to interact in the mind of the audience. It is when he is being tidy that Jones is at his least stimulating.

Unprotected Sex is by no means a flawless piece, with a particularly annoying tendency for characters to pointlessly echo the ends of their sentences ("And so I'm leaving, leaving"). Yet it is a brave and powerful exploration of the harm caused by the emotional repression inherent in traditional male culture. The fact that the production is being staged without shouting distance of the overheated testosterone atmosphere in Cardiff's Millennium Stadium as it hosts the Rugby World Cup lends a bittersweet touch. One part of town is celebrating the cult of the tough man, whilst a few hundred yards away they are scratching at its roots and drawing the conclusion that beneath our bluster, it may be men who are the unprotected sex.

Toby O'Connor Morse

To 6 November. Box Office: 029 20 646900