In Shaw's 1894 love triangle drama, Candida is not a yeast infection but the wife of a Hackney parson, the Reverend James Morell, who infects men's hearts. Her husband, a successful and single-minded socialist preacher, is deeply in love with her, as is the young poet Marchbanks, whom Morell rescued from a life of sleeping rough and welcomed into their apparently happy home. Drama develops out of a crisis when Marchbanks declares his love for Candida to Morell, who suddenly realises that the foundations of his marriage are built on sand. The play has much in common with Ibsen's A Doll's House, a play that Shaw deeply admired. Like Nora's Torvald, Morell believes his is a happy marriage but discovers his wife is not quite the woman he thought. Much of the pleasure of Christopher Luscombe's well-observed period production is in watching Andrew Havill's interesting Morell move from confident self-belief to bewildered self-doubt as he starts to understand that even goodness is a form of selfishness. However, much less is at stake here and Shaw's play is short (at least by his standards) and mostly sweetly comic as the self-importance of men is pricked by the down-to-earth influence of women.
Jonathan Fensom's design is handsome, although it is hard to believe the absent children's toys would be left around in such a well-ordered household, and it is even harder to believe Shaw's premise that Candida might really choose between two such ridiculous men, when, as every mother knows - and Ibsen knew, too - the only choice she would make would be for her children.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 01483 440000. Then touring.
