Dion Boucicault's mid-19th-century play is the missing link between restoration comedy and Oscar Wilde's witty comedies of manners. If it sometimes lacks the savagery of both, it makes up for it in freshness, the way it takes everything at a gallop, and its ability to temper cynicism with sentiment.
Gerard Murphy - got up in an outsize tweed suit and mop of curls so that he looks rather like Tweedledum - plays the ageing Sir Harcourt Courtley, intent upon claiming in marriage the young country heiress Grace Harkaway, who believes herself inoculated against love. But Sir Harcourt's son, the debt-laden Charles (Laurence Mitchell), has arrived at Grace's country home ahead of his father, and is quickly smitten with his mother-to-be. Everything romps along nicely, and when the action threatens to slow, Boucicault throws a meddlesome lawyer into the brew, as well as the wonderfully eccentric Lady Gay Spanker (Geraldine McNulty), who rides to the hounds and whips men into shape.
This is undoubtedly fluff, but Nikolai Foster's production has a strong sense of mischief. There are good performances, too - notably from Murphy, whose corpulent Sir Harcourt has more than a touch of Toad of Toad Hall about him in the way he combines vanity and a complete lack of self-knowledge with a soft heart.
McNulty is ferociously entertaining as Lady Spanker, and there is good support from Nigel Hastings as the lawyer with an eye to a quick buck, Alan McMahon as the valet and Ken Bradshaw as a conman who has reinvented himself so often that he no longer knows who he is. Some of these characters would be right at home in the 21st century.
· Until May 17. Box office: 01635 46044. Then touring.
