THEATRE / The plot thickens: Paul Taylor on a London revival of Marivaux's The Cheating Hearts

The music is very Draughtsman's Contract, sounding as if a baroque harpsichord suite has been hijacked by something altogether more mechanical and inhuman in its camp, throbbing, faintly diabolic drive. The look, likewise, is both jokey and unsettling - all lopsided black-and-white engravings of haut monde life that could have come from some 18th-century version of Homes and Gardens. The doors give on to tantalisingly foreshortened vistas of ever greater luxury, each bathed in its own vividly coloured luminescence. The highlife characters tend to burst through these doors with sudden violence, like interrogators out to surprise their victims.

With just the right degree of poisoned playfulness, Laurence Boswell's new production of Marivaux's The Cheating Hearts (translated by Ranjit Bolt) creates the sense of a swanky surveillance world where (as in other plays by this author) a carefully controlled and rather horrible emotional-social experiment is taking place.

Here, Silvia (Anna Healy), a simple country girl, has been kidnapped by a Prince (John Baxter) who has fallen in love with her while posing as a simple cavalry officer. She, though, is inconsolable without her Harlequin (Marcello Magni), and when he visits her at court, the pair are subjected to all the wiles that worldliness and ingenious sophistication can concoct to prise them apart. As you watch the sort of callous manipulation and cynical subterfuge that would reach their apogee 60 years later in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, you may even be deluded into thinking of the no-nonsense droit de seigneur method in a new and oddly flattering light.

The best performance comes from the actress playing Flaminia, the most puzzling of the characters. Whether palpitating with desires that are partly feigned and partly beyond her control, or adjusting eyes of slithery calculation into expressions of genuine-seeming injury, Sara Mair-Thomas keeps you guessing throughout as to the motivation of a woman who is prepared to sacrifice herself to the Prince's happiness and become the principal schemer in a plot to bring him and Silvia together. Since this involves switching her seductive powers on to Harlequin, the mystery deepens. Is she a masochist? Does she fancy a bit of rough? Does she get a cool, cerebral thrill out of proving the effectiveness of her agile manoeuvrings? Both very funny and more than a touch troubling, this Flaminia manages to keep all these options open.

On the whole, the acting is alert to the spirit of the piece, though I have to confess to a blind spot over Marcello Magni. Marivaux's work is obviously influenced by the Commedia dell'arte and Magni's gifts as a clown and a mime will be familiar to followers of Theatre de Complicite. So what's the beef? Only that his compulsion to flirt with the audience always seems to override his putative affection for anyone on stage. So that, when Silvia claims that she only loved Harlequin 'faute de mieux', you can readily believe her.

Gate, Pembridge Rd, W11 (071-229 0706)