"Thank God I'm normal," is the cry of Archie Rice, the fading music hall performer who is the anti-hero of John Osborne's 1957 drama set during the Suez crisis of the previous year. It's a play that for heartfelt bitterness makes Look Back in Anger seem both mild and mannered.
Archie, of course, is not normal at all: he is a Brechtian device who interrupts the main action as three generations of the Rice family pickle themselves in gin, bile and despair.
He is also a metaphor for a dying England at the fag end of its empire, washed up and washed out.
In Osborne's England it is always raining, although in Archie's case it is mostly raining crocodile tears. At its very best, Osborne's play has both the punch of Brecht and the elegiac mournfulness of Chekhov, it is effective drama even when it is in two minds - which it often is - whether it should stick up two fingers or mourn Old England's passing.
Osborne was bigger on nostalgia than he was on radicalism.
John Tiffany's production begins stiffly, as if the play was from two centuries ago not the middle of the last one.
It really starts to find its feet with the arrival of Corin Redgrave's smarmy Archie playing it for all it's worth to the audience. The play sits well in the faded glory of Playhouse with a cunning design that strips the stage back to bare brick wall so that the naturalistic scenes are a play within a play.
Some performances need more energy, but Paola Dionisotti is outstanding as Archie's sad, sozzled wife Phoebe, and Redgrave never falters as Archie, making something tragic of a man who has glimpsed his own hollowness and responded: "Why should I care?"
· Until February 7. Box office: 0151-709 4776.
