Can you make something out of Nothing? Yes, I think you can. Director Robert David MacDonald has said that Henry Green's Nothing is a novel you either love or hate. I'm afraid I'm one of the dissenters. It's a postwar tale of posh Londoners, a society comedy that contrasts the laissez-faire romance of John Pomfret and Jane Wetherby with the chaste relationship of their respective children Mary and Philip.
If it weren't for the occasional reference to the new austerity and "state jobs", the 1952 novel could be a century older, such is its arch awareness of upper-class decorum and blithe ignorance of life beyond this rarefied set. I found it stuffy and laboured.
In adapting it for the stage, however, Andrea Hart has one great advantage: Green's novel is written almost entirely in dialogue. She has lifted it straight off the page but fashioned it succinctly into a 100-minute play that has all of the lightness but none of the numbing repetition of the original.
I was not among those guffawing on the opening night, but MacDonald's superbly acted production does bring out the character comedy underpinning Green's book. Sophie Ward brilliantly shows Jane Wetherby to be an acidly catty matriarch, who disguises her self-interest with elegant phrases and pity-me pleas for sympathy.
Like Ward, the other five actors give big, bold performances, among them Simon Dutton as a suave and libidinous John Pomfret, Candida Benson, fabulous as the earnest Mary, and Lorna McDevitt as the romantically spurned Liz Jennings, perfectly capturing the proud pathos of a woman destined to be second best.
The word "nothing" resonates around Hart's script, reminding us of the story's trifling weight, but it's hard to fault a production so aware of its own inconsequentiality and performed with such poise and swagger.
· Until December 20. Details: 0141-429 0022.
