The Danny Crowe Show, Bush Theatre, London

When Orton met Springer

Put yourself in this young woman's lop-sided bra. Lynnette is half-way through a breast-enlargement operation when her manager – who has just gone bust (so to speak) – rings up and tells the surgeon to down tools. Where is a girl to go in the circumstances? Well, on to The Danny Crowe Show – a Jerry Springer-style daytime TV freak parade – if Lynnette has anything to do with it. The "Divorced But Still Doing It" and the "He Was Having Us All and None of Us Knew" brigades are 10 a penny. A one-implant girl has, she reckons, a unique selling-point. It could be the start of something big.

Unfortunately, Magda – the researcher in David Farr's new play – wants stronger stuff. Zealous to a deranged degree, she has gone Awol in the North-west, hungry for "raw underbelly". When her colleague and former lover, Miles, tracks her down, she seems to have discovered a particularly juicy slice of the stuff. The action is mostly set in the sordid front room of an old railwayman's cottage in Cheshire. With its cobwebs, skulls and inverted crosses, it looks like a den of satanic vice. This is the living hell in which a teenage brother and sister exist, terrorised by an alcoholic, devil-worshipping gravedigger father, who drove their mother to suicide. It seems ideal material for TV's "Pope of Pain", especially when the brother, Peter, announces that he has just stabbed to death the perverted patriarch.

In our corrupt culture of emotional exhibitionism, the notion that people will fabricate tortuous sob stories for a few moments of TV celebrity is not exactly a revelation. But Farr's talented play – a cross between Orton-esque farce and topical satire – tilts the idea so that we keep seeing the material from fresh, arresting angles. The ogre father is, in fact, a mild-mannered, kindly type, whose unexpected return from a "crematorium away-day" threatens to blow the cover of the young couple. I particularly liked the notion that there are, indeed, painful feelings that need to be aired between Peter and his father – both of them abandoned by his mother – but that, when the opportunity for a dialogue arises, Peter treats his pop as simply incriminating evidence to be tidied away, so that he can go to London and enjoy a fleeting, wholly bogus intimacy with Danny Crowe. "We've waited 16 years to have a conversation; I just thought we could hang on another night," he explains, as he tries to bundle the distressed oldster upstairs.

In Dominic Hill's astute production, Mark Rice-Oxley and Lisa Ellis are a wonderful mix of provincial innocence and ruthless guile, their warped aspirations formed by an exclusive diet of daytime TV and glossy magazines. As with Orton's characters, their talk is a crazy, kinetic collage of inadvertent pastiche. But it's chilling how completely the pair have been brainwashed by the language of style surveys and victimhood. In the morality-free zone of their discourse, allusions to mochaccinos in Primrose Hill jostle affectlessly with references to the black hole of emotional trauma. Even more loathsome are the TV researchers (played by Clare Holman and Tom Goodman-Hill) as they vie for control of these exploitable frauds. At least Miles is honest. He desperately needs to fill a primetime live special (having been let down by another duo of con artists), whereas Magda is so screwed up and self-deceiving that you feel she'd be better placed on Danny Crowe's sofa than on his payroll.

To 10 Nov, 020-7610 4224