The 18th-century French playwright Marivaux is very much back in fashion. And so he should be, not because his pointed elegance fits well within current notions of theatrical chic, but because his cruelly comic stories of love tell us much about our own dissembling hearts.
Marivaux's plays can be delightful, but there is also something merciless and scientific about them. The Triumph of Love features a cross-dressing princess who wins and breaks hearts. Her sexual game-playing is quite as nasty as anything in Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
The tiny, enclosed space of the Watermill is the perfect setting for this drama of secrets and cloistered lives. Weather permitting, the play is staged in the Watermill gardens, where the comic capers begin in a hectic first scene in which we discover that Princess Leonide has disguised herself as a man so she can win the heart of Prince Agis, whose throne her family usurped.
If she marries Agis and restores the throne to him, love and justice will prevail, but first she must outwit the philosopher Hermocrate and his sister Leontine, who have brought Agis up in seclusion and taught him that love is dangerous.
Sparklingly played by Anna Hewson, sexy and sexually ambiguous in her white jodhpurs and chaps, Leonide leads everyone a merry dance, bribing the conniving, money-grubbing servants to back her cause and making the philosopher and his sister, who have renounced affairs of the heart for the those of the mind, fall in love with her.
Jonathan Munby's production, glued together by Hewson's dazzling performance, is an enjoyable romp, and there are other fine performances too, particularly from Alan McMahon as Hermocrate's calculating valet.
But Munby neglects the darker aspects of the drama. Leonide's love triumphs, but Hermocrate and Leontine pay the price: they are awakened to feeling but condemned to a life of philosophy without love. Marivaux makes you wonder whether Leonide's means justify the ends; Munby is so keen that we have a good time, he doesn't question it.
· Until May 17. Box office: 01635 45834.
