Love's fire: passion, tumult, anger, and desire. Shakespeare's sonnets offer every kind of variant on love's mysteries. I've seen them sonorous, mellifluous (Cleo Laine's jazzed up version from the 1960s), deconstructed - by Volcano, the young British physical performers.

But perhaps it takes an outsider to add real spice as America's The Actors Company show here in the Barbican's First International Theatre Event, BITE 98. Seven short plays inspired by the sonnets commissioned from some of America's theatrical best, the whole set makes a sexy, spry rejoinder, bubbling with spirit and contemporising humour in which Tony Kushner's lubricious, cheeky Terminating - or Lass Me ine Schmertzen Nicht Verloren Sein (Ambivalence) to give it its full title - is the star turn.

Inspired by Sonnet 75, Kushner twists the classic client-trying-to-leave-therapist dilemma through a gay (as in homosexual) wringer to hysterical, scatalogical effect.

Darker shafts emanate from Wendy Wasserstein's aptly titled Waiting for Philip Glass, a characteristically caustic satire on New York's glitzy name-dropping socialites (Sonnet 94) and from Marsha Norman's simply styled 140, a chain-reaction of relationships suggested by Sonnet 140.