Diana acts tough

Here, to console those of us who have lost out in the rough game of love, is Dame Diana Rigg acting the tough lady in Joanna Murray-Smith's superior soap opera. Honour meditates in sometimes acerbic and amusing fashion upon a philandering spouse and his put-upon wife.

In the role of a sixty-something lapsed poetess with a PhD, a casting which requires a painful stretch of the imagination, persistently attractive Dame Diana bravely takes news of her writer-husband George's adultery, after three decades of loyal union, on the chin. She never, though, shows the slightest tremor of a breaking heart.

When it comes to hearts, ash-blonde Dame Diana seems instead to regard this troublesome organ like dirty linen - best washed out of sight, off stage.

When up against embarrassed husband George and his fancy-girl, Natascha McElhone's calculating, seductive Claudia, she duly remains wittily cool, calm and untouched, right down to her painted fingernails. The crucial element of anguish goes missing in David Grindlay's startlingly poor production.

Comparisons are necessary. When Honour was produced at the National Theatre in 2003 Eileen Atkins raised the play yards above its superior soapopera station. Her muted tones and facial expressions, as informative as a map, powerfully registered nuances of marital shock, grief and bewilderment.

She really suffered after Corin Redgrave's unhappy George succumbed to the flattery of Claudia, whose proposed book on Movers and Shakers left this husband all shook up.

Grindlay's production scorns highwire emotion and the sexual tension driving George into the arms of provocative Claudia. People too rarely meet each others' eyes, let alone gaze into them.

Martin Jarvis's George tries to play troubled, but comes across as weird and incoherent. He behaves as if he half-wished he were playing an Ayckbournian, comic adulterer. He acts with his head, hands, fists and shoulders. Nothing comes from within.

Honor, George and Claudia are all unbelievably supposed to be intellectuals, but they sound thick and pretentious. It is, though, as if they had been badly translated from some foreign language. "To feel things as a writer is the important thing," smug George helpfully explains.

"There are times I argued over his stubborn idealism," Honor tells Claudia, in tones of an obituary tribute. The script, which admittedly includes tart ripostes delivered by Dame Diana with spiky elan, is matched by Liz Ascroft's weird set.