Maths fails to add up

For the first time in 15 years there is a much-needed change of artistic director at Hampstead. But Anthony Clark's debut as the new supremo comes with a disconcerting blast of anti-climax.

Clare McIntyre's mildly amusing comedy of manners, which follows awkwardly in the distant but creative footsteps of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour and Simon Gray's Spoiled, attempts to show the damage done when a teenager falsely accuses his tutor of homosexual assault.

Miss McIntyre may be famous for the feminist, award-winning texts, Low Level Panic and My Heart's A Suitcase, but her sexual politics strike curiously old-fashioned, hackneyed notes. She continues the same, tired old strike, right down to the denouement when two fortyish women, both made miserable by their discarded or discarding husbands, give a toast to "being one self ", whatever that exhausted cliché means.

Clark's uncomfortable production, with fussy, clumsy scene changes, accentuates rather than disguises the play's structural weaknesses, its implausibility, crude psychology and characterisation. And Patrick Connellan's set of empty, wooden frames - hanging, standing or titled - is both ugly and theatrically useless.

The scene is the holiday home of middle-class Paul (Christopher Ravenscroft), dowdy Jane (Tricia Kelly), and their teenage son Tom. Sally Dexter's blowsy, estate agent Anna, all ogling, simpering charm, arrives with her own teenager JJ (hangdog Ben McKay) and wild hopes of hooking yet another man. JJ, already identified as unreliable, accuses young maths tutor Brian (bland Martin Wenner) of improperly touching him.

The accusation would be rigorously tested in the real world. Here hysteria rises like steam and when the slightly ridiculous Anna voices the tired, old slur that homosexuals go for teenage boys there is no repudiation.

The accusation, though quickly disproved, rebounds on Jane and bisexual Paul, who falls for the young maths tutor in scenes that rely upon the exchange of deadly clichés. McIntyre's real interest, though, is in anatomising the downfall of a marriage of inconvenience wrecked by the tutor. Tricia Kelly's Jane forcefully expresses resentment, scorn and grief.

But she is so fired with contempt for the wretched Paul, who is one of those overdone homosexuals, racked by Catholicism and guilt, that the couple's battle is dully one-sided. Nicholas Figgis, as their doleful son, injects a flash of genuine emotion into this indigestible dramatic hash.

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The Maths Tutor