Christopher Columbus! Why do we persist in throwing our daughters onto the pyre of 19th century fictions? Do we really believe that Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy have an enduring appeal - or do we simply offer them to our children because that is what we read, and our mothers read, and we retain a sentimental attachment to them? We don't just cook like our mothers - very often we read like them too.
Watching Emma Reeves's serviceable and largely enjoyable adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel, it seems improbable that any modern miss would take the March girls as role models.
If the novel speaks to us at all, it is as a piece of romantic fiction, and in Reeves's version it is the pairings off that have you on the edge of your seat, not the way the girls subdue and conquer themselves to become Good Wives. The exception of course is Beth, who goes one better and expires like an angel. Reeves posits the idea that she dies of leukaemia. Anorexia would seem another possibility.
The thinness of the original books means that, although Reeves offers both Little Women and its sequel Good Wives in under two hours, the evening never feels rushed.
But while it tells the story in a decent enough fashion, Reeves's script and Andrew Loudon's production never manage to do more than skate over the surface. There is a terrific moment when Amy falls through ice - in a split second, you see Jo's struggle with herself as she almost decides to turn her back on the little sister who has hurt her so badly.
The evening cries out for many more such moments. An amiable if old-fashioned evening in every way, that serves well enough as long as you don't go expecting anything in the Shared Experience league.
·Until January 13. Box office: 020-7794 0022.
