What a devastating confidence-trick Somerset Maugham played on 1920s theatre-goers. The Circle, as Jonathan Church's deft revival reminds us, masquerades as a comedy of sexual and social manners, designed to flatter audiences into applauding their stage counterparts as witty and pretty. Beneath its polished, sub-Wildean veneer, though, you can discern a savage critique of upper-class Anglo-Saxon morality and behaviour.

Simon Higlett's spectacular design for the pillared, chandeliered Dorset drawing-room of Arnold Champion-Cheney, a thirtysomething Conservative MP, sets the satirical tone. It has the anonymous air of a Heal's furniture department, with marbled floor, silver-embossed chairs, chandeliers and sofas. The air of sumptuous decorum is shattered by the arrival of Arnold's mother, Susan Hampshire's Lady Catherine - Kitty - whom he has not seen since she eloped to live permanently abroad decades ago with Lord Porteous, once a promising politician and best friend of her betrayed husband, Clive.

Richard Lintern's superficially rendered Arnold never conveys the MP's angry sadness as a result of being abandoned by his mother in infancy and then growing up in a sex scandal's aftermath.

Maugham paints a grim black-comedy picture of the old couple, their youthful passion faded into a partnership of mutual displeasure and a quasi-marriage of inconvenience. Philip Voss makes a brilliant, querulous Porteous,his face frozen in an expression of dyspeptic resentment and is powerfully matched by Susan Hampshire, whose air-headed, radiantly winsome Kitty cares to see no further than the end of her vanity-mirror and shows more concern for her mislaid lipstick than her lost son.

Once David Yelland's suave Clive appears, the scene is set for an English display of civility that masks much grief. Maugham's focus, though is on the future, incarnated by Clive's vacuous wife, Elizabeth, to whom a shrill-voiced Charity Wakefield lends a simpering artificiality. Elizabeth is poised to repeat the past by running off with Bertie Carvel's charismatic Edward Luton, while Richard,simply objects to his wife's defection as a bad career move for him.

The final spectacle of the old couple encouraging the young ones on their adulterous way and towards, no doubt, a terrible future, is fraught with cynicism. If only Church had cracked the play's sexual code and made the antiques and interiordesignloving Arnold into the closetqueen Maugham intended then the circle of this haunting, state of the upper-middle classes comedy, would have been perfectly closed.

Until 29 August (01243 781312).