Theatre is often thought to be a conservative medium. In fact, it changes very rapidly. And if you want to see just how far it has moved in the past 60 years, you have only to visit Wild Orchids - a new translation, by Timberlake Wertenbaker, of Jean Anouilh's Leocadia, written in 1939 and shown in London in the 1950s as Time Remembered.
Anouilh's theme is eternal: the illusion of romantic love. And to illustrate it, he shows how a Paris milliner is hired by an eccentric duchess to impersonate her bereft nephew's late, deeply adored Leocadia. Old play-going hands will quickly recognise many of Anouilh's ideas. From Pirandello's Henry IV comes the notion of catering to a supposed madman's folly. And as the milliner, who closely resembles Leocadia, turns from aristocratic toy into articulate human being, one suspects that Anouilh was a close student of Shaw's Pygmalion.
What dates Wild Orchids is not the story but the leisured way Anouilh tells it. It takes virtually the whole first act for the duchess to explain to the hijacked hatter why she has been lured to her Brittany estate. Even more crucially, we get the main point long before the characters do. Every detail we hear about Leocadia (her pet snake; her passion for eating wild orchids) convinces us that she was a frivolous narcissist.
It's not that we are cleverer than past audiences - it's simply that we absorb narrative information more quickly and are less patient with the kind of whimsical detail (such as the estate's ivy-festooned, rabbit-filled taxi) that Anouilh uses to pad out the story.
Like the duchess's estate, the play itself is a picturesque relic. But two things in Edward Kemp's production quicken it into theatrical life. One is the fluency and wit of Wertenbaker's translation. The other is Catherine Walker's performance as the musing milliner. Instead of a gawky shopgirl, Walker offers us a strong, intelligent young woman who quickly sizes up the situation. She lends this fairytale an emotional realism and her translation into a white-gowned Leocadia look-alike is profoundly stirring.
Andrew Scarborough's doomed aristocrat has a welcome asperity and Patricia Routledge endows the dotty duchess with her wonted vocal precision. When she says of her nephew "I want him rooted to the spot", she conjures up a terrifying vision of pillars of salt.
But the presence in the cast of the amazing Timothy Bateson (one of the original quartet in Waiting For Godot) reminded me of the Beckett tramp who remarks of a minor diversion that it passed the time. To which the only response is: "It would have passed anyway."
· Until July 20. Box office: 01243 781312.
