WEALTHY, unfulfilled women travel to the Caribbean for sun, sea and sex. Local men, for whom life in this impoverished picture-postcard setting is far from paradisal, charm the cash from their purses with honeyed tongues and honed bodies.

Who is exploiting whom? Does she who holds the purse strings also hold the power? Female sex tourism is a hot topic in the arts. The British release of Heading South, a film about the subject starring Charlotte Rampling, took place last month; now comes Tanika Gupta’s new play, directed by Indhu Rubasingham.

The exchange of flattery and physical pleasure for meals, drinks and even — via a marriage of convenience — a passport, raises a plethora of troubling economic, race and gender issues. Sadly, Gupta’s schematic, sometimes wryly funny play cannot compare with the disturbing intensity of Trade, Debbie Tucker Green’s similarly themed 40-minute play presented by the RSC this year.

Lynda Bellingham is Maggie, a middle-aged divorcée eyeing the boys on a Jamaican beach with lascivious voracity. It’s a brave performance. With her breasts overspilling her gaudy swimsuit and her clumsy attempts at saucy flirtation, Maggie cuts a lonely, faintly pathetic figure — and she knows it. The blandishments of the “beach boys” may drown out her doubts temporarily, but while she desires and fetishises them, salivating over their skin, their “big, luscious, kissable lips” and their alleged sexual prowess, she also hates them for making a fool of her.

There is a nasty whiff of colonialism here, too. Kitty (Heather Craney), a 38-year-old white Mancunian, enjoys ordering her Jamaican lover into bed and calling him her “houseboy”. Her high-handedness is repugnant and delusional; the men contemptuously refer to the tourists not as the goddesses they make them feel, but as “white milk bottles . . . fill dem up”. You also sense that the women’s behaviour is underpinned by bogus, postfeminist assumptions that they have won their entitlement to selfish gratification.

There is a complex interdependency between all parties, and Gupta does not treat it with nearly enough delicacy. Some of the characters are underwritten and the action is often melodramatic.

There are two sentimental subplots — the married black American woman in love with a Rastafarian she has been visiting for 16 years, and the mixed-race British girl in search of her long-lost father — which, rather than supplying a balance to Maggie and Kitty’s fraught liaisons, add a soapy undertow to material that needs a tougher approach.

Rubasingham’s production is persuasively acted, not least by the superb Bellingham. But Gupta has merely scratched in the shifting moral sands of her subject matter.

Box office: 020-7565 5000