Wild Orchids, Festival Theatre, Chichester

A bouquet of bittersweet memories

The clocks famously stop for Dickens's Miss Havisham when she is jilted at the altar – her self-imposed habitat, thereafter, the mouldering wreckage of the wedding breakfast. An injured heart causes time to stand still in a more fey manner for Prince Albert, the hero of Jean Anouilh's Leocadia, a 1939 play revived by the director Edward Kemp under the title Wild Orchids and in a trim new translation by Timberlake Wertenbaker.

The Prince has spent two years stagnating in inconsolable grief for his glamorous singer lover (Leocadia) who died, in a ridiculous Isadora Duncan-style mishap with a scarf, just three days into their heady affair. To stop him committing suicide, all the scenes of the couple's whirlwind romance – an ice-cream stall, a gypsy nightclub, a bar-tabac – have been transported, with their original staff, into the grounds of the family chateau in Brittany. Here the Prince morbidly keeps his memories alive. Then his aunt, the dotty Duchess, gambles on a bizarre form of therapy. Amanda, a young milliner from Paris who bears an uncanny resemblance to Leocadia, is summoned to the estate. Perhaps the sight of her will persuade the moping royal to switch his affections from a ghostly ideal to flesh-and-blood reality.

At the start, one feared the worst. The brightly coloured set by Poppy Mitchell looks like something on cut-price loan from the panto season rather than a fairy-tale vision of a Gallic Arcadia. Then, several feet after her truly awe-inspiring bust, Patricia Routledge enters, putting you in mind less of an eccentric French aristocrat than of an amply-proportioned amateur lady sleuth from classic English detective fiction. Twee features of the Prince's fantasy half-life, such as the rabbit-infested taxi that is rooted to the spot with ivy, lead you to expect that the play itself will be a superannuated vehicle that can no longer function.

So it's a pleasure to report that itexerts an undeniable charm. Its whimsy is flecked with wisdom as it traces how an idealised conception of love gives way to the warmth of a love that does not need to be viewed through rose-tinted spectacles to survive. Catherine Walker, the production's greatest asset, brings a wonderful luminosity and assertive intelligence to the role of the milliner thrust into the perplexing predicament of having to impersonate the deceased icon. Though Andrew Scarborough's handsome, prickly snob of a Prince initially dismisses her as "a little shop girl, without class, without mystery, without charm", Walker's Amanda is an enchantingly mettlesome young lady who develops the confidence to force him to admit the truth: that Leocadia was a frigid, motor-mouth narcissist, who could never have been a long-term solution to her lover's privileged ennui.

The pace is leisurely and the audience arrives at the main points well in advance of the drama. But there are many gentle pleasures on offer. Romance and humour intertwine beguilingly when, entering the gypsy nightclub in a ravishing white gown on the arm of the Prince, Amanda copies the Duchess's absurdly rolling imitation of Leocadia's alleged gait. There's a bittersweet undertow, too. Ms Routledge's redoubtable-matron routine is complicated by intimations of the nostalgic, childless widow who wants to throw life open to the young before it's too late. A show that looked set to be an antiquated turn-off proves to be vaut le détour.

To 20 July (01243 781 312)