FLEET ST CHEAT

REVIEWED - RAG TALE: THE style Mary McGuckian adopts for her broad-as-the-ocean satire on the tabloid media has such a dramatic effect that it suggests one of those gimmicky techniques 1950s producers used to dream up to compete with 3-D: NauseaVision! Vomit- erama!! Sickurround!!!

We have become accustomed to the pseudo-random shaking that cameramen use to suggest the busyness of real life. But Rag Tale features a paradoxically predictable class of disorder. Each of the shots seems to last the same number of picoseconds. A bewildering number of those shots begin with the camera turning from four o'clock to eight o'clock, though if one of the characters has taken drugs, the horizon tends to spin through the complete 180 degrees, leaving the actor - usually the increasingly insufferable Jennifer Jason Leigh - momentarily upside down.

This is a shame. Take a few Dramamine and grasp onto the seat in front of you and you should discover some amusing barbs amid the improvised dialogue. Telling the story of attempts by proprietor Malcolm McDowell - more Mr Burns than Mr Murdoch - to do away with his troublesome editor Rupert Graves, the picture does have a Hogarthian viciousness worth savouring.

But one is never quite sure how ludicrous the story is meant to appear. Calling the newspaper The Rag (shades of Waugh's Daily Beast) suggests we are in a dramatically heightened universe. That is the only reasonable way to justify the melodramatic denouement, with its weird allusions to Chinatown. Yet all that shaky stuff implies some attempt at realism.

Jason Leigh, playing McDowell's wife and Graves's lover, drawls through her role as if she has just woken up from a decade-long coma. Graves, only sporadically shouty in the manner of Kelvin MacKenzie, legendary editor of the Sun, seems very unsure as to exactly how ghastly his character should be.

It ends up seeming messy and over-heated. McGuckian, the Irish director of Best and This Is the Sea, and a prodigious recruiter of fine casts, intends Rag Tale to be the first part of a trilogy. We wish her the best, but a few deep breaths need to be taken and a few armpits should be fanned before the project progresses.