Audiences change plays. Last year at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, local playgoers roared at every move made by Ardal O'Hanlon in Ronald Harwood's version of this celebrated French comedy. But the same piece, played in front of a self-consciously starry West End first-night crowd, seems something short of riotous.
The original title of Francis Veber's piece, Le Diner de Cons, gives you the basic idea. Each week a group of smug Parisian bastards throw a dinner-party in which a hapless "twat" - Harwood's chosen word - is unwittingly feted. But on this occasion the tables are turned, as a prize nerd turns up at the apartment of a smooth publisher and wreaks havoc. Everything he touches, whether it be his host's ailing marriage, slipped disc or tax evasion, is made irretrievably worse by this innocent.
The ruinous effect of good intentions is a classic dramatic theme: Ibsen dealt with it tragically in The Wild Duck, and Ayckbourn comically in Joking Apart. And here Veber plays a number of elegant variations on a single idea: in particular he turns the chumpish guest into a telephone virtuoso, frantically eager to assume fakeidentities to rescue his host's disintegrating marriage.
But, in contrast to a genius like Feydeau, who gives even the lowliest bell-hop some defining tic, Veber is wasteful in his use of minor characters. He also treats women with a casual disdain comparable to the publisher's attitude to the dinner guest.
O'Hanlon as the chosen victim is the evening's main pleasure. Clad in a tightfitting suit that seems one size too short, and clutching his briefcase as if it contained the Holy Grail, he exudes an almost saintly goodness. His instant reaction to a four-letter word is to back into a corner, and when the publisher announces that his mistress is a nymphomaniac, O'Hanlon edges along the sofa as if fearing contamination. He follows a basic rule of acting by playing the character from his own point of view: not as a creepy bore but as a naive enthusiast whose only desire is to make the world a better place.
As the publisher, Nigel Havers lacks the brutal egotism of his Dublin counterpart, but there is a delightful cameo from Geoffrey Hutchings as a tax inspector arbitrarily summoned to the apartment: he sniffs around the place like a practised bloodhound and reacts to a vinegar-laced bottle of vintage wine with a memorable jaw-frozen horror. But, for all the style of Robin Lefevre's production, this is a play of intermittent rather than continuous hilarity, in which O'Hanlon is, quite literally, the saving grace.
· Until January 11. Box Office: 0870 060 6621
