The title of Mike Bartlett’s new play may excite your inner punster, but the piece itself is far from being a trawl through tawdriness. Instead it’s a smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion.

Ben Whishaw plays John, an apparently gay young man who lives with M, a spiky stockbroker. While taking a break from their relationship, John has an encounter with W (The IT Crowd’s Katherine Parkinson). This sparks unexpected sexual excitement, and suddenly his whole existence is in turmoil.

Bartlett’s premise is intriguing. For John, choice is not a luxury. Rather, it’s disabling. He oscillates between wanting to return to M and planning a new life with W. His equivocation is deeply irritating and at the same time painfully familiar to us.

The writing is lubricious, sometimes grubby and in places savagely unpleasant. But it has a wounding authenticity. We laugh nervously, aware of its precision.

James Macdonald’s direction accentuates the awkwardness of events. There are no props and there’s no furniture; designer Miriam Buether has created a space that manages to be both anonymous and oppressively intimate.

Seated in the round and in remarkable discomfort, the audience feels as if it is watching something akin to a medical procedure or a pagan rite. Although the characters rarely touch, their physicality is viscerally immediate.

The ferally feline Whishaw has some fine moments of tenderness, tousled angst and wounded loquacity. Meanwhile, Parkinson is kooky yet steely. She is capable of a magnetic stillness.

She also gets some of the best lines, as when she’s aroused and says she has a “gap on” (replace “gap” with “hard” and you’ll get the picture).

It’s Andrew Scott as M, however, who impresses most. Reminiscent of a turbocharged Dylan Moran, he combines sweary viciousness with a kind of hapless vulnerability.

Bartlett’s play is excruciating – not in the sense that it’s bad, but in its relentless probing of raw emotions. In the final stages I found myself wanting to bellow at the characters. I didn’t, of course, though I was desperate to rouse one from his self-pity and another from somnolent indecision.

The trio’s manipulations and self-deceptions are blazingly conveyed. Some will dislike Bartlett’s less than chaste language, and no one could pretend that this is a soothing or uplifting way to spend an hour and a half. But it’s an impressive package.

Until 19 December. Information 020 7565 5000.