The Front Page is a classic American comedy. Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday, which gender-switches the central role, is a perfect Hollywood film. By blending the two John Guare has produced a weird hybrid which survives chiefly as a vehicle for Alex Jennings and Zoe Wanamaker: when they are on stage together, the piece crackles.
The chief advantage of turning Hildy Johnson, the ace reporter lured back into a Chicago newsroom on the eve of marriage, from a man into a woman is that it spices up the writer-editor relationship: it becomes a comedy about love expressed through work.
But Guare confuses the issue by highlighting the 1939 setting and turning the escaped prisoner whom Hildy and her editor, Walter Burns, see as scoop-material into a fugitive European anarchist. Both the original play and the Charles Lederer movie script were chiefly fascinated by the enclosed world of newspapers.
Guare, however, gratuitously seeks to turn the play into a comment on American isolationism. It is the sexual, rather than the national, politics that give the piece its resonance; and in an odd way the sparring between Jennings and Wanamaker echoes the comment on Astaire and Rogers that "she gave him sex and he gave her class". Jennings adds to the Machiavellian ruthlessness of the editor who would sell his mother for a story an hilarious hint of swishiness.
When Hildy's fiance announces that his mother can't sleep on a train, Jennings retorts, "Sounds my kind of woman" with a wonderful throwaway campness. And, feigning an interest in insurance, he cries, "I'm ripe- pluck me" with a mock-maidenly glee.
The point of this production is that Burns needs Hildy not just as a reporter but as a sexual complement. And Wanamaker plays up to this superbly by lending Hildy a roughouse energy and cheerful sensuality.
She has a wonderful habit, while trying to hide the escaped prisoner, of hitching up her skirt and tittuping across the stage in high heels. Wanamaker and Jennings play together like champions and there is good support from Nathan Osgood as a prissy journalist-poet and Margaret Tyzack as an outrageous battleaxe in fox-furs.
But Jack O'Brien's production pointlessly presents the show as if it were all taking place on a movie-stage. Even Bob Crowley's monochrome Olivier set is needlessly surrounded by studio lights. This seems to me typical of a show that is neither fish, flesh nor fowl. But one's objections are overcome by the joy of seeing two marvellous performers doing a ritual mating-dance in a journalistic zoo.
· In rep until November 22. Box office: 020-7452 3000
