There’s potential in the idea behind this Liverpool Playhouse production, which relocates Shakespeare’s battle of wits and hearts to England in the aftermath of the Second World War. But having come up with the concept, the director Phil Willmott has done disappointingly little with it.

The period detail, rather than illuminating the play from a fresh perspective, feels more like gimmickry and window-dressing. Beatrice becomes a hearty land girl, Benedick a returning airman, Leonato a diplomat and Dogberry a camp vicar and Scout master, whose rosy-cheeked young charges scamper all over Christopher Woods’s rather unwieldy ivy-covered country house set. There is a shooting party with a real dog; there is a VE celebration with glittering evening dresses, champagne and yards of Union Jack bunting. But while all of that may hold a nostalgic charm, there’s no exploration here of the social changes ushered in by the war — most notably, its impact on gender and class divisions. Nor is there much sense of the joy and relief over longed-for peace and reconciliation, or of the lingering trauma of conflict.

Instead, there’s an awkward jollity about the production that is as evident in the performances as it is in the clumsy farcical business that often bedevils the staging. The acting seems forced, the jokes laboured. Initially it seems as though the hearty bonhomie of Sally Ann Triplett’s Beatrice must be masking some more complex emotional state, but if it is, Triplett never lets us in on the secret. Simon Merrells’s Benedick is bluffly amiable, but there’s a serious lack of chemistry between him and Triplett. It’s not that they’re bad; they’re just bland.

Among the rest of a largely unremarkable company, Faz Singhateh’s Don John is a crude pantomime villain; Ally Holmes’s maidservant Margaret, on the other hand, is something of a scene-stealer. She’s hardly subtle, but the comic quirks and moments of quiet wistfulness with which she endows one of the play’s less rewarding roles make her immensely watchable.

Gavin Kaufman’s overblown music provides an intrusive aural accompaniment to the action, making it still more difficult to become properly engaged by it. The whole feels like a sepia-tinted picture of a prettified past that never was: blurred, flat, and not remotely real.

Box office: 0151-709 4776

Editor's choice

• Live fast, die young: The 27 Club
• Madonna's 50 most memorable moments
• Proms Podcast with Pierre Boulez