Jenny Sealey's productions with Graeae, the disabled actors' theatre company, play with images of and attitudes to illness and disability. Most recently, Fittings: The Last Freakshow and The Fall of the House of Usher have helped to move the company on to a new level.
Middleton and Rowley's 1622 thriller about Beatrice, a beautiful young woman who finds her fiance an inconvenience when she falls in love with another man, should be ideal material for Graeae. Has there ever been a play that toys so exquisitely or torturously with the notion of seeing and not seeing, the beauty that is in the eye of the beholder and the ugliness of the soul?
The disfigured De Flores lusts after Beatrice; she loathes him, cannot bear to look at him, and yet she exploits his passion by getting him to murder her unwanted fiance. What Beatrice fails to see is that by doing so, she has entrapped herself in a web of deceit, from which there is no escape but death.
Sealey's production draws on a new version of the play by Clare McIntyre, which cuts the madhouse subplot and transposes the story to Merseyside in the 1960s. Beatrice is now a young swinger in a psychedelic mini-skirt and a fast-changing world of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. There is nothing wrong with that, but the social setting and the design, which gives us pop art, the Rolling Stones and key moments in the 1960s, prove a distraction to the real passion, blind love and disgust that drive the play. Watching it is never an involving experience; the production thinks too much and doesn't feel enough.
This is reflected in the performances: most of the cast have an acting style that prefers ironic distance to a full-on embrace of the play and its dark underbelly. Karina Jones's Beatrice has the right sense of self-absorption but never suggests a woman swept away. Only David Toole as De Flores gets the measure of it, showing a man who watches and waits his moment, but is still blinded by passion.
· At the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster (0800 028 3042), tomorrow. Then tours to Cambridge, Clwyd, Wolverhampton and across Britain until November 17.
