Jennifer injects pathos and joy

Kevin Spacey, the Old Vic's artistic director, must have taken an overdose when it comes to daring. How else could he have risked staging this dullish, dated comedy of manners and minor immoralities in high society America of the Thirties, where champagne and witticisms are served between meals?

Too often you are left savouring the lack of fizz in this limply pointed production by Jerry Zaks. Anyone who hankers for Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn memorably falling in love all over again in the film version of The Philadelphia Story or its musical transposition into High Society, where Grace Kelly was caught between the rival singing attractions of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, should reach for their DVDs rather than depend on this unlively concoction.

However, we are offered the moderate, comic pleasure of Spacey, sleekly fitting into Grant's elegant shoes as discarded lover CK Dexter Haven, who manages to substitute himself for the would-be bridegroom at the eleventh hour.

After Hepburn on celluloid, all arch and artificial as Philadelphia heiress Tracy, Jennifer Ehle offers a fresh and terrific attraction. Miss Ehle portrays a haughty, huffy girl who lets champagne and the smitten writer-journalist Macaulay almost, but not quite, get the better of her virtue in the swimming pool. She transmits real pathos.

By turns priggish and vulnerable, she seethes with old resentments as she confronts her unwanted fiancé, her unloving father and a desired new man. Unfortunately this psychologically convincing approach rather starves the comedy of the oxygen of frivolity and amusement.

Philip Barry, a playwright who hardly expressed a whimper of social conscience, loved celebrating the conscienceless rich at play. When it came to morality he turned away. He pokes effortful fun - and not nearly enough of it in Zaks's lowkey production - at the radicals and well-heeled alike. His uneventful plot depends upon lots of money and

Ehle's aloof, little rich girl Tracy who finds herself variously tempted, dazzled and reassured by men who are eager to make her body and wealth theirs.

These suitors respectively represent old money, new money and relative poverty. John Lee Beatty's cluttered stage set looks the acme of vulgarity, not opulence. Spacey pads around ìt in suave, feline, comic fashion as the uninvited former husband who keeps his cool.

He delivers a sardonic, sophisticated put-down with nicely timed relish. Yet of sexual electricity when in sight of Tracy he shows no more than the rare flicker. The ghost of Cary Grant will not be disturbed.

A far too peripheral subplot offers a Thirties comment upon press intrusion and the games journalists play. Macaulay and his sharp photographer, Lauren Ward's Liz, arrive uninvited to write up Tracy's wedding. Nicholas Le Prevost, a prime delight as a lecherous old uncle and Oliver Cotton, as Tracy's philandering father, are involved in the need to hide truth from such meddlers. Talulah Riley as Tracy's infuriatingly precocious young sister observes the carry-on and carry-off with mature eyes.