Review: Ugly ****

Red Ladder is one of Britain's most significant Left-wing theatre companies and it does not want to provide you with a comfortable night at the theatre.

The company's latest production begins its assault on the senses before you even get through the door. How many marketing experts would have had a heart attack at a play called Ugly?

Yet there is no better title for a visceral and emotional play that wants to hit you in the solar plexus with its message and warning about global warming.

Writer Emma Adams warns her audience what our world will become if we don't start to understand the impact we are having on it.

Rod Dixon's filmic direction of Adams's disorienting script serves to make the play look good but, surprisingly, allows the audience to distance itself.

This distancing does, however, work – the intensity of the script would perhaps have been overpowering had Dixon not chosen to stage the play in such a filmic fashion.

The play is set in a dystopia where the resources have been used up, water is a precious commodity and the population is rated in terms of its "specialness".

Plunging the audience headfirst into this alien world, the production creates a to-be-expected sense of alienation. How quickly you buy into the concept will impact how soon you buy into the journeys of the various characters.

A poignant and moving piece, it perhaps only works because it is so alienating.

Is it worth the effort? The world could depend on it.