National Theatre's John is a National DISGRACE, says QUENTIN LETTS John (Royal National Theatre) Verdict: Hytner at his worst Rating: Sir Nicholas Hytner will soon finish his stint running the Royal National Theatre. One of his parting gifts to us is John, a dance-influenced production about unprotected sex in gay saunas. How brave! How enlightened! Perhaps not. Perhaps this is just a seamy, sorry exercise, shorn of morals, commissioned in a moment of silliness by an artistic director who, for all the hyped indulgence and baubles he has received from the Establishment and the London Evening Standard, has had an erratic tenure. The dancers in John execute their art with rare grace and precision. The company also performs backstage heroics changing the configurations on an almost incessantly mobile revolve. Technically, the show has things to admire. Extreme: Taylor Benjamin and Garth Johnson in John at the National Theatre It starts with clever depictions of the disruptive upbringing of a man called John and his sexually violent father. After about 15 minutes of this impressive if explicit material we switch to a gay sauna full of men showing us their whatnots, in at least one case semi-erect For the next hour, sauna sex is everything. We are told of an orgy of 15 men. We see two blokes seemingly pleasuring themselves. There is a ballet of buggery, an offstage gay rape, endless talk about what complete strangers get up to in saunas. One charming scene is devoted to the amount of excrement left in saunas after a busy night. You taxpayers are helping to fund this. Is director Lloyd Newson not simply engaged in honourable reporting about such places? After all, the words are all from verbatim witness statements. Yet the delicacy of the choreography betrays Mr Newson. It glamorises, almost beautifies, this foetid world. He is on a mission to normalise. All the men shown - bar one who has a bit of a pot belly - are good-looking, slender, athletic. I bet that ain't the way things really are in gay saunas. A voiceover does start giving a lecture about genital warts, gonorrhoea and worse horrors. By this point John - if it is still him, for characterisation is muddled - has caught Aids and doesn't care that he is infecting 25-year-old strangers. Still he is held up as some sort of victim. We live in a West in which free speech is often subjugated to social pressure. Dramatists do not tend to promote racism. They do not glamorise violence, particularly against young innocents - not if they want to be given further work. They are even leaned on not to show good-looking stars smoking. This is done in the name of responsiblity, and the Hytners of this world are generally all for it. Yet here is our Royal National Theatre celebrating sleazy joints where boys are raped, given deadly infections, a milieu devoid of love, a world where it is somehow considered fine to be selfish. John, after mocking Daily Telegraph readers for being intolerant, proclaims he is a liberal. Exactly how can it be liberal to have unprotected sex with a youth and knowingly give him Aids? Foetid world: Here is our Royal National Theatre celebrating sleazy joints where boys are raped, given deadly infections, a milieu devoid of love, a world where it is somehow considered fine to be selfish Having written in support of gay rights since the late Nineties, I hope I can say without being accused of homophobia that John is, despite the artfulness of its performers, a disgrace. Not that Sir Nicholas will mind. He will rub his little millionaire, State-enriched hands in glee at having created controversy. He has his knighthood already. There is even talk that he will soon be sent to the House of Lords, there to moralise and legislate over us. This, folks, is the state of art and politics in 21st- century Britain.