Snatches

The Kama Sutra of sitting on a chair has yet to be written, but if anyone has plans to embark on such an unlikely masterpiece, they should go and watch this play about Monica Lewinsky. Two women in garish leotards and ridiculous wigs portray the hapless Lewinsky and Linda Tripp in a script taken directly from the tapes of their famously banal phone conversations.

Sitting upside down on chairs, the right way up, or suggestively straddling them, performers Patricia A Chilsen and Jean Taylor repeat conversations in which Lewinsky's staggering naivete is almost as attention-grabbing as Tripp's tragic obsession with her hair. "I want to kick his [Clinton's] nuts so they flatten into little pancakes," declares Tripp at one point, but Lewinsky is as unsuspecting as a Disney rodent, and confides: "I almost called you Mum."

Laura Strausfeld's script fascinates, because if the "he" of the conversations were not the former President of the United States, you would conclude that both women should be banished for ever to a hairdresser's parlour. Realising that a woman with such a candy-floss mindset almost brought down Clinton's presidency is rather like discovering that Bugs Bunny shot Kennedy.

As Tripp, Chilsen puts in a particularly malignant performance, in which her jealousy, contempt and fondness for Lewinsky battle it out towards the infamous conclusion. "I keep on hearing double clicks," ventures Lewinsky. "That's my gum," blurts out Tripp. Thus was Clinton's fate all too nearly sealed.

? Showing at the Assembly Rooms until 26 August. Box office: 0131 226 2428. Transfers to New End Theatre, Hampstead (020 7794 0022), from 29 August.