Everything is just a touch too sunny in Christopher Morahan's handsome production, which pitches George Bernard Shaw's story about a ship of fools heading for the rocks of disaster more as a Wildean comedy than a Chekhovian drama. There is no underlying anxiety or hidden foreboding.
Even at the end, as the characters face the abyss of the first world war and the bombers of retribution fly across the South Downs, these people greet oblivion with a kind of ecstasy, still totally unaware that the cultured, leisured world as they know it is about to end abruptly . John Gunter's set, with its bleached sun decks and figurehead of a blindfolded woman, makes the point very neatly.
Written in 1916 at the savage height of the Great War, but not performed until 1920, Shaw's "Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes" is shot through with an anger at the complacency of people who have brains, income and all the time in the world but not the wit to save themselves and others from catastrophe.
The line-up of characters, from the vulgar capitalist, the young girl trying on different attitudes for size, the enterprising burglar, the fantasist and the siren is just a little too neat, and as ever Shaw is a windbag and always says everything twice when once would have done very nicely.
But as David Hare, who directed a memorable production of the play at the Almeida, has pointed out, this is the original state-of-the-nation play, and it is also a rare and satisfying example of a Shavian drama in which private meets public - but more unusually, in which heart and head are also joined.
It is a hell of a play to cast evenly, though, and there are highs and lows here: Joss Ackland's Captain Shotover, more cuddly seadog than mystic, is a little too winning, Anna Carteret's Lady Utterwood too arch and Susannah Wise's Ellie Dunn almost entirely without illusion. But Clare Higgins is utterly irresistible as the bewitching Hesione Hushabye, giving a big, bold and brave performance that persuades you that this is a woman who might indeed be foolish but who also lives her life like a candle lit at both ends. One that is about to be snuffed out.
• Till August 12. Box office: 023-8071 1818.
