"Were you there in '56?" someone asked me as if I were a battle-scarred veteran of the theatre wars. Well no, I was at school actually. But I did catch John Osborne's groundbreaking play early on and have loved it and lived with it ever since. Watching Peter Gill's 50th anniversary revival, I am struck yet again by its infinite adaptability.
Initially, Osborne's play was seen as a social document: a record of the flaming frustration of 1950s youth. More recently, it has been treated as a Strindbergian study of marriage. Now Gill, unexpectedly for such a naturalistic director, treats it almost as an extended dream in which characters soliloquise to an atmospheric soundscape. Jimmy's tirades are accompanied by distant trumpet-wails, Alison's memories of their early social gatecrashing by tinkling cocktail-party chat, and Colonel Redfern's recollections of India by battalion bands and puffing trains.
I see Gill's purpose: to remind us that Osborne's play is an artificial construct full of competing memories. He even suggests a kinship with Beckett's Waiting for Godot, also in this Bath season: both plays are based on anxiety-ridden, time-filling yearning. But, by placing so much stress on solipsistic, private narratives, Gill underplays the marital tension.
For me, Jimmy's tirades are not arias but tactical weapons in a continuing sex-and-class war in which Alison retaliates through provocative silence. You should feel the play is a duel-to-the-death between skilled combatants rather than a series of set speeches.
Within that limitation, Richard Coyle is a first-rate Jimmy: charismatic enough to explain what attracts both Alison and her friend, Helena, but wild enough to imply a personality disorder. Coyle also handles well Jimmy's memories of his dying father which acquire new force from John Heilpern's Osborne biography. Admittedly, Mary Stockley is too passive an Alison: this, after all, is a woman who says, "I pretended not to be listening because I knew that would hurt him." But Rachael Stirling is superb as the stylishly sardonic Helena, and Richard Harrington as the dependably loyal Cliff and Ronald Pickup as the bewildered colonel lend immaculate support.
With its stress on the soliloquies, this production reminds you of Osborne's gift for an incandescent prose in which music-hall rhythms combine with moral fervour, as if Max Miller had been crossed with John Bunyan.
· Until September 2. Box office: 01225 448844.
