"What does it mean?" was the question most commonly asked of JM Barrie about his curious 1920 ghost story, Mary Rose. "Not a great deal" is the answer here. This unevenly acted revival by the Playhouse's new associate director, Richard Baron, emphasises the Edwardian ghostliness of the tale, so that it comes over like a pale imitation of The Woman in Black without its heart-stopping moments.
For all its old-fashioned clunk and click, Barrie's play is more interesting than just a Halloween thriller-chiller. If it is capable of making the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, that has less to do with its supernatural elements and much more with its ability to tap into our unconscious desires and fears, the beautiful and the unspeakably terrible.
In the story of Mary Rose - a child who disappears but mysteriously reappears, entirely unaware that almost a month has slipped by, or even that she had gone missing - Barrie clearly drew on his own tragic masterpiece, Peter Pan. It is worth remembering, too, that the play was written in the wake of a national tragedy: almost an entire generation had been wiped out on the battlefields of Europe during the first world war, and then in the flu epidemic that followed. Like Mary Rose, millions went missing, remaining for ever in the memory of the survivors as young and golden while they and the world grew weary, old and forgetful, lurching towards another catastrophe.
Watching this revival, I was struck how the play, with its considerable emphasis on ageing, memory, forgetfulness and lapses, could even be played as a metaphor for the horrors of Alzheimer's. But Baron shows no inclination to make such imaginative leaps, and his production is handsome and rather dull. In the end it is little more than sentimental; it never demands that the audience ask: "What does it mean?", only: "What will happen next?" Telling the story is absolutely crucial, but it seems a pity in a play as rich as this not to excavate it more thoughtfully and tell its story to some worthwhile purpose.
· Until October 26. Box office: 0115-941 9419.
