Anyone attracted by escapist high-society romances, with countervailing shafts of criticism levelled against the vacuous, hypocritical landed gentry, should be attracted by the idea of Jean Anouilh's 60-year old comedy.

Ring Round the Moon premiered here in 1950 with Margaret Rutherford as a wheelchaired Madame Desmortes, Claire Bloom's ballet girl and Paul Scofield playing her identicaltwin nephews, Hugo and Frederic. It concentrates upon making a fairy-tale dream come true. The convolutions of the plot allow for little tension while love, snobbery and desire run their course.

Frederic invites Isabelle, a poor ballet dancer, to a ball at the ch‚teau, intent upon offering his twin an alternative to Elisabeth Dermot Walsh's impressively malicious Diana - on whom Frederic hopelessly dotes.

Isabelle duly resists the charms of a Jewish millionaire's money, wins a war of words with the superior Diana and ends up in the arms of the man she loves. True to Anouilh's genre of rose-tinted plays, the innocent face down the corrupt and worldly and all too easily demonstrate that the nice can win.

The actors in Sean Mathias's not very well cast production rarely find the light, sophisticated tone that gives Ring Round the Moon its fitful sparkle. Madame Desmortes ought be a combination of worldliness and snobbery, eccentricity and mischievous wit.

Instead, Angela Thorne restricts the role to imperious hauteur. Belinda Lang turns Isabelle's mother, a gushing, social-climbing romantic, into a shrill if amusing caricature. JJ Field takes on both twins, and keeps the cold-hearted Hugo, who rains down a fusillade of assaults upon the vanities of his class, stranded in handsome blandness; his Frederic seems more a subdued wimp than the smitten romantic Anouilh imagined. The best aspect of his performance is an athleticism that allows him to exit stage right and appear stage left within moments.

Anouilh's fairy-tale atmospherics and bittersweet romanticism are belied by Colin Richmond's sets. The rococo winter garden of Anouilh's imagining, "with yellow plush curtains and green plants" , looking out on parkland, is here reduced to a shabby, empty conservatory without any view at all. Fry's translation, with its flurries of overblown poeticism, cannot conceal the deficiencies of this minor Anouilh.