Any little girl who is being taken to see Little Women in the Lilian Baylis Theatre rather than the Nutcracker playing on Sadler's Wells' main stage next door, should seriously consider divorcing her parents. Instead of sugar-spun froth and silliness, she will have to endure two hours of home-spun moralising and dour wisdom.
It's not that this production is boring, just lacking in spirit. Louisa May Alcott's novel may not offer thrills by the page but it has a crispness that Novel theatre company never quite communicates. Part of the problem is the stage, which is big enough to accommodate an entire fringe theatre. The designer, Rachel Payne, fills the space with all manner of cumbersome objects: a huge staircase, acres of wood-panelling, big rustling dresses. But the action is constrained by this fusty realism, by the desire to maintain the family's solid wooden table and Marmee's patchwork-covered chair as the production's constant focal points. Parties take place behind a transparent screen; a trip to Europe is confined to a corner of the stage by the bottom of the stairs. Anything that threatens to lift the production has the life drained from it immediately.
Director Andrew Loudon is clearly striving for theatricality. But he does so in highly questionable ways. In the theatre, it's quite possible for a dead character to hover over her loved ones as an unseen guardian angel - but should a director really take advantage of that? Watching Nikki Leigh Scott's Beth rise from her deathbed and climb the stairs to heaven to the sound of an angelic choir, you wish that Loudon had left some things unshown.
This scene aside, Scott's squeaky, fluttery performance as Beth is one of the production's most convincing, largely because she has so little to work with. Equally, Ann Micklethwaite makes an enjoyably thoughtless bitch. But the more complicated characters never emerge in all their contradictions. Sarah Grochala's Jo confuses tomboy feistiness with mere petulance, while Sarah Edwardson's Meg struggles to appear excited by fashionable fripperies. You leave thinking that the story was written as a novel, and should probably have stayed that way.
· Until January 31. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
