Jan Fabre has a reputation as a radical and it is much deserved. Most productions promising provocative material make do with the F-word and same-sex nudity, barely beginner grade by Fabre’s standards. The Belgium-based theatre-maker pushes at what used to be called decency, with a kind of extreme burlesque that mocks our rampant materialism and moral incontinence. Think of a mix of Abu Ghraib and a pornographic Hello!.

In a programme note, his work is described as dragging us along by that which is “simultaneously disgusting and tantalising”. His method is to make our excesses so funny that we forget we are watching a masturbation competition where the thoroughbred participants are goaded by their ejaculatory trainers.

The five men look like Croatian thugs and the four women like Helmut Newton models, and they go hog-wild, with chunks of the action unprintable in a family newspaper. Suffice to say that one scene involves what looks like a man inserting the muzzle of a gun into a place that needs a lubricant.

One scene I can describe features a woman humping a designer handbag, being humped back by a designer sofa then giving birth astride a shopping trolley to all manner of bling including a loaded hand gun. In another painfully funny sequence Jesus Christ is made over by a French fashion magazine maven, who coos: “Do you love girls or boys? I bet you love everyone!”

In another, two Americans boast of their whiteness while donning Ku Klux Klan robes then doing what looks like a Michael Jackson moon walk. Should he sue?

The Klan hood reappears in an Abu Ghraib spoof, followed by a shopping trolley waltz, to Blue Danube, of course. There are also quite a lot of stage drugs and what look like real cigarettes.
The main criticism of Fabre’s work is that its targets are too easy. Abu Ghraib. Tick. Shopping and f****ing. Tick. Bankers who socialise debt and privatise profits. Tick.

Another is that the material is insufficiently metamorphosed for the stage and occasionally verges on the freak show.

This is all valid but doesn’t undermine Fabre’s ability to weave comedy and grotesquerie into potent theatre. The 90-minute piece is predominantly speech-based, although there is a patchwork soundtrack and the final danced scene is thrillingly done. And the timing is brilliant, with the comic coat-tailing the macabre.
Tonight only (0871 663 2580, www.southbankcenre.co.uk).