Encounter none too brief

Tonight at 8.30 Parts 1 and 2
Minerva, Chichester
**

After the epic two-parter Nicholas Nickleby, Chichester offers up another - mercifully air-conditioned - double bill. Yet anyone who expects a repeat of the Dickens success will be sorely disappointed, as Tonight at 8.30 drags on so tediously it threatens to become Tomorrow at Breakfast Time.

Noël Coward dreamed up Tonight's nine short pieces - of which six are performed here, in two groups of three - as a vehicle for him and Gertrude Lawrence to act, sing, dance and clatter gaily up and down the English class system. Aside from the daunting scale of the project, one can see why there has been no major revival since the 1936 premiere. The actors - and especially the actresses portraying women whose strained self-sacrifice teeters on the verge of self-annihilation - have a desperately difficult job to prevent a descent into parody as they hurl Received Pronunciation at each other.

Things all start off promisingly, however, with Red Peppers, a parody of the dying days of variety entertainment. Alexander Hanson and Josefina Gabrielle, the sporadically convincing 2006 answer to Noël and Gertie, have fun with the backstage backbiting as husband and wife comedians. This is, we think, a pleasant amuse-bouche, presaging greater delights.

How wrong we were. In The Astonished Heart, vowels suddenly go clipped and strained and there begins what appears to be an endless series of variations on a theme of Brief Encounter. This film's prototype, Still Life, was one of the original nine playlets, although director Lucy Bailey hasn't selected it for her final line-up.

Things plod on, the actors pluckily change their wigs and the physical "comedy" - tangled telephone wires, anyone? - becomes so laboured it virtually requires crutches. It is only when Coward slides down the slippery class pole in Fumed Oak, to pitch up with a fractious, small-minded suburban family, that the characters become in any sense convincing. Hanson, Gabrielle and Madeleine Worrall as the snivelling daughter all excel. Yet six hours of this is simply too, too much, my dear.

Until 2 September. (01243 781312).