Thank heavens for Tamsin Greig! Her tight-skirted, melancholic Beatrice, who has left more than one flush of youth gracefully behind, is just the kind of cool woman to deliver winning shots in a sex-war.

Her tongue serves as a sharp weapon in the battle of the sexes. It leaves Joseph Millson's pretty-boy Benedick, who basks in a perpetually extended adolescence, verbally mauled and reeling.

Greig's performance has become the striking, saving grace of Marianne Elliott's spectacular, protracted production, set for no discernible military or political reason in Cuba 1953 and wildly praised at its Stratford premiere in the summer.

Elliott's Cubanisation of the play is the theatrical equivalent of Botox - a seductive but superficial enhancement technique that gradually wears away. The idea is to freshen the old plot and it does so in Lez Brotherston's pillared, galleried bar and courtyard setting, though you would expect far more sexual electricity to be switched on.

Salsa band music, an over- long masked dance-party, an atmosphere generated by cigar-smoking, boozy soldiers home from battle and elements of knock-about farce, all distract us from wondering when the Cuban aspect will assume relevance.

It never does. Elliott offers scant insights into sexual politics or the intriguing psychological problems that made lonely outsiders of Beatrice and Benedick, not to mention Patrick Robinson's curiously bland, remote Prince Don Pedro and Jonny Weir's villainous Don John, who holds the stage with his brooding, sinister quietude and unfathomable evil.

Nowadays directors emphasise Much Ado's tragic potential. Elliott accentuates the farcical, rather diminishes the serious. The marriage-rejection of Morven Christie's Hero by Adam Rayner's bovine Claudio ought to darken the mood before happiness is recovered, but neither of them suffer enough. Bette Bourne makes Dogberry seriously weird, a bewigged and lipsticked old party.

Greig's Beatrice is at first different. Her contemptuous turn of phrase poignantly conceals the self-defensiveness of a woman who finds herself stuck on the shelf and secretly smitten by Millson's younger, melodramatically selfabsorbed homme fatal.

She then follows his line of popular but vulgar slapstick, when both eavesdrop and both gather their love is reciprocated: he collapses backwards, felled by a potted plant; she involuntarily sets a scooter's horn blaring and summons him to dinner with a megaphone. It is not my humour. This Much Ado opts for belly laughs rather than wit or pathos.