Charlotte Jones's play is both an English country Hamlet and a comedy about bee-keeping with a sting in its tail. Roger Haines's elegant regional premiere lacks the star names of the National Theatre cast but Jones's characters are indelible enough to outlive their creators.
Felix Humble is a fat, ill-adjusted astro-physicist who cannot banish the shadow of his dead father. His mother Flora is a fading, former fashion-plate who has banished her late husband's bees. The unseemly haste of Flora's proposed remarriage creates an Oedipal tension rarely encountered outside Queen Gertrude's bedroom.
Jones's great feat is to plant this amidst the hollyhocks and hedgerows of an English country garden. If the patterns are Shakespearean, the patter is pure Joanna Trollope - the scene in which Mercy (a delightfully distracted Helen Blatch) mistakenly seasons her gazpacho with the dead man's ashes is a masterpiece of muddled middle-Englandism.
And if that weren't enough, there's a strain of Stoppardian scientific allusion tying everything together - though perhaps Felix's elucidation of superstring theory is a metaphor too far. But Ian Midlane creates a plausible portrait of a tarnished golden boy: as fuzzy and unaerodynamic as a bumble bee, who squints and blusters as if he has just had smoke blown in his face.
Anna Nicholas is fractious, feckless and, ultimately, affecting as his vain, mother; and Stephen Mackenna provides boorish support as her uncouth paramour, a foul-mouthed big band fan who runs a fleet of buses. And Jones hints at a certain resolution with the discovery of a nest of bumbles under the potting shed - new bees, or not new bees? That is the question.
· Until May 1. Box office: 0161-236 7110.
