Stoppard's first full play is invariably billed as a variation on Hamlet. Gemma Bodinetz's heavy-footed production emphasises that it is also a homage to Beckett: after three hours waiting for Hamlet, Vladimir and Estragon are dead.
We meet them on a set that is itself a wooden stage, representing anywhere and nowhere. As the lights go up, the 12 doors in its two walls clang shut. The sound of options closing is deafening. The young men in modern charcoal suits, caught in an game whose rules and purpose they are never told, are placed by Bodinetz not in the corridors of Elsinore itself but in a nightmare production of Hamlet. This starts in the dress and acting style of the early 17th century, and works its way through to the present.
The play is robust and wide-ranging enough to respond to such treatment. What it does not seem, in this production, is either very funny or engaging. Tom Smith gives the earthbound Rosencrantz a saucer-eyed, dropped-jaw charm. He is sharply contrasted with Nick Bagnall's febrile Guildenstern. But their shouted performances leave little room for sympathy with Rosencrantz's desire to go home, or Guildenstern's frantic attempts to remember enough of his philosophy course to sort out either the laws of probability or his own little life.
Stoppard satirises these debates and feelings, but not because he does not take them seriously. Genuinely enjoyable moments of theatrical invention (the players flown in on a set-within-a-set, a threatening Hamlet from Simon Wilson) too often just seem welcome interruptions of this longish evening.
· Until October 19. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
