The most gnomic piece of careers advice given to Benjamin Braddock at his graduation party is the celebrated steer: “One word – plastics.” Terry Johnson’s stage adaptation, which combines Charles Webb’s original novel and the 1967 screenplay with scenes of his own invention, has Benjamin dressed in full scuba-diving gear when Mrs Robinson launches her predatory campaign on his virginity. But Lucy Bailey’s production, in association with Curve Leicester, succeeds in capturing the strange, synthetic quality of mid-60s American life that can make The Graduate seem so seductive.
Bailey’s production has the raffish poise – and reprehensible sexual politics – of an episode of Mad Men, while Mike Britton’s design is a Hockneyesque homage to a world of swimming pools and the sun setting over a permanent cocktail hour. The bedroom scenes are too funny to be prurient. Catherine McCormack gives a glassy-eyed performance as the insatiable Mrs Robinson, for whom Jack Monaghan’s Benjamin has the doleful look of a puppy unwillingly dragged in for obedience training.
Slightly less successful is Johnson’s attempt to bring emotional ballast to the piece in the second half by bulking up the role of Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine. Emma Curtis plays the part with great charm, though much time is expended unnecessarily emphasising the point that she is destined to become as disillusioned as her mother. The self-defeating search for an emotional core merely serves to suggest that The Graduate is, above all, a triumph of easy superficiality for which there is really just one word: plastic.
• At West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until 27 May. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
