Consider the spectacle of Eric Cantona down on hands and knees in a police cell, wearing just pants and being savagely whipped by Béatrice Dalle while hard-faced prison guards pleasure themselves. It’s one of many startling moments in this chamber piece of sex, surreality and the absurd, like something by Luis Buñuel or Luigi Pirandello, or a sexed-up version of TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. Cantona plays The Stud, who is legendarily well-endowed. Later, he’ll reveal what Dalle calls “the treasure in your trousers”, which might have made an interesting alternative title. Is it a prosthesis? Maybe. Stud is one of a mysterious group of people who gather in a room designed like an early-80s hotel lounge bar, and are revealed to have quasi-vampire immortality, kept alive forever by endless orgiastic sex. Their dialogue is a prose-poem of enigmatic yearning and melancholy reflection, with flashes of wit. One of their number is a beautiful boy sought by the police. A derisive cross-dressing maid greets officers at the door saying, pertly, that a “choir of missing boys” is kept in the cellar, but the public wasn’t ready for their first concert because it was “too avant garde”. The orgiasts are warned to never allow sadness to overcome the perennial heat of desire and pleasure. But it almost does.