WCXX

The action is set in a handsome Arts and Crafts vicarage in Hackney. Its incumbent is the Rev James Morrell, a go-ahead Fabian vicar famous for his eloquent speeches on social issues. He has an attractive wife, children we don't meet, and seems altogether too pleased with himself.

But his smug complacency is threatened when his wife Candida invites the aristocratic but penniless 18-year-old poet, Marchbanks, into their home.

The youth falls for her with a great deal of soppy verbal emoting, to the extent that the Rev begins to feel threatened and loses some of his bumptiousness. Meanwhile his wife, tired of being regarded as a trophy by both husband and admirer, plays a devious game with them both.

Unfortunately there isn't a hint of an erotic spark in the writing, and neither director nor cast seem able to supply it in what proves dispiritingly droopy evening. Frank Dillane is so pathetically wet and self-indulgent as Marchbanks that you feel like marching onto the stage and giving him a good shake.

Jamie Parker's mixture of muscular Christianity and gnawing jealousy is curiously unpersuasive, often amounting to little more than bluster, and you never feel that Charity Wakefield's Candida is even remotely attracted to the poet, still less that she would ever consider running off with him . As a result, the whole play feels pointless because so little is at stake.

Indeed the smaller roles prove more interesting than the leads, with Jo Herbert particularly entertaining as the gruff, virginal typist who clearly holds a torch for the vicar herself; and strong support from Christopher Godwin as Candida's father, a garrulous manufacturer blessed with an amoral charm that seems to anticipate Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion.

But this is a dusty dud of an evening - museum-piece theatre that cruelly highlights Shaw's limitations as a dramatist.

Until July 20. Tickets: 01255 448 844; theatreroyal.org.uk