With its pressure-cooker sense of enclosure, and action that takes place predominantly in two rooms, George Huang's 1994 film Swimming With Sharks is an ideal candidate for stage adaptation.

It will fit neatly into the compact Vaudeville Theatre, and there is even a sense of rightness about it coming to the stage. Huang's cynical, low-budget look at the underbelly of the film business was the springboard to Kevin Spacey's movie career. Until then primarily a stage actor, Spacey tore up the screen in his first leading film role as sadistic producer Buddy Ackerman.

The producer considers it his right, nay his obligation, to tread on as many little guys on the way up. Nobody today remembers writer-director Huang, or its co-star Frank Whaley: they remember Spacey's operatic, capricious, abusive rants as the boss from hell. That, and the scene where Buddy's assistant Guy (Whaley), turns on his boss, tying him to a chair and subjects him to some exquisitely nasty tortures. The thought of Tabasco sauce in a paper cut still has the power to make grown men wince.

Apart from Spacey's stand-out performance, the film is a cross between Nine To Five and The Player, only distinguished somewhat by its flashback structure. But it is a neat, sharp-witted tale which may blossom again on the London stage.