Daniela miscast in Camille

Daniela Nardini, who found fame and a bit of fortune in BBC TV's This Life, has the looks and physique to play an attractive, dashing Nurse in Romeo and Juliet.

But to cast her as La Dame aux Camelias, the gorgeous 22-year-old, tubercular courtesan who brings smitten aristocrats to her bedroom and their knees, leaves me groaning and gaping in disbelief.

This is miscasting on the grand scale. For Miss Nardini is too well-covered to play someone dying of TB or to resemble the fragile, slim-line beauty of Dumas's imagining. She seems too mature, spirited and naturally assertive to play a wilting, selfsacrificial whore.

She may sound fairly middleclass, but ushers in an air of clanking, hand-waving, boisterousness as she romps awkwardly around in a big dress with a bustle that would frighten the horses, let alone an infatuated old French Duke.

In France, surely, the top people's prostitutes have style. Besides, when it comes to Marguerite's suffering in illness and love, Miss Nardini skims the surface, missing vulnerability or despair's lower depths, with her voice regularly sinking below the audibility level. And her cropped hair and inappropriately voluminous costume remind me of some Victorian lady who does good works in the slums.

Alexandre Dumas's famous 18th century novel, which inspired Verdia's La Traviata, is radically overhauled in this unsatisfactory adaptation by Neil Bartlett. Perhaps the odd casting of Miss Nardini is intended to make Marguerite less a languishing flower in a Parisian hothouse and more a self-possessed woman. Bartlett's adaptation does not wallow in romantic despair about his heroine, who thinks she's found true love in young Armand but selflessly abandons him.

Nor does it much brood about the pricks of conscience afflicting a courtesan whose heart is too big for her own good. Bartlett thinks Dumas's novel deals with ownership of bodies and hearts. He cuts out the high fashion, Parisian charm and champagne. The play's first line, "Everything for sale", stresses that this is a world where money buys you everything.

So the production is staged in a single location, supposed to be the abandoned, ruined apartment which was Marguerite's home until her death. But Nicky Gillibrand's drab, anonymous and over-lit set, randomly strewn with chairs and tables that kept blocking my view of characters on stage, looks coldly anonymous, not ghostly. In trying to pierce to the essence of this bartering Parisian demi-monde, David McVicar's cool production remains curiously Anglo-Saxon and lacking in passionate intensity.

The complex sexual relations between Miss Nardini's Marguerite and Elliot Cowan's elegant and well-spoken but not very ardent Armand never rise above the smouldering. Katherine Parkinson as Olympe, to whom Armand defects, is not so much a French courtesan as a comic cockney English streetwalker. Marguerite's fair-weather friend, the shrewd, intriguing milliner, Prudence, who knows that the course of true lust never runs far, is similarly converted by Bartlett and Beverley Klein into a crude, comic turn.

Armand's father - who in the subtle original resorts to politeness and pleading in his successful effort to persuade Marguerite to give up his son - is written and played by Paul Paul Shelley as a barnstorming villain. This production misses the power, pathos and period allure of the novel.

Camille