Back in 1950, soon after the young Peter Brook had brought it from Paris, Kenneth Tynan called Anouilh's Ring Round the Moon “a complete wedding cake, traced with an icing gun on gossamer”, and he wasn't being rude. After all, it was one of its author's pièces brillantes, a class of drama that brought light to a Crippsian London still grimly recovering from the Luftwaffe. Indeed, Oliver Messel's conservatory set was so enchanting, and the fireworks that ended the evening so dazzling, that (said Tynan) audiences simply couldn't stop applauding.

Well, Christopher Fry's translation still sparkles with Wildean wit. But the fireworks in Sean Mathias's revival are blobs of light at the back and Colin Richmond's set is as dowdy as a greenhouse bereft of so much as a ripening tomato. Yet maybe that's as it should be, for contemporary London seems to me less in need of wedding cakes, gossamer and brittle humour than the chastening you find in Anouilh's pièces noires or pièces grinçantes: Waltz of the Toreadors or his inexplicably neglected Poor Bitos.

And Ring Round the Moon has just a little bite. As always with Anouilh, there's darkness, even bitterness, beneath the comic surface and theatrical trickery. The play concerns two handsome twins: warm, kindly and ineffectual Frederic; Hugo, who is the very opposite. J.J. Feild, who plays both here, looks the role or roles but doesn't differentiate enough between them. However, he leaves you in no doubt that Hugo is callous, manipulative - and pretty disingenuous when he claims that the reason he has invited an impoverished beauty called Isabelle to a posh family ball is to distract his brother, who is engaged to a spoilt rich girl who dislikes him.

I don't think I'm revealing too much when I tell you that this troublemaker's ruse ends up working, though for unexpected reasons, and the result is a happy-seeming ending. There are also plenty of good, entertaining lines en route, many of them from Angela Thorne as a Bracknell-like aunt who, unlike one or two others, doesn't succumb to caricature. But Anouilh's trademark views are also apparent: a dislike of the rich and casually cruel; a tendency to idealise the young and unspoilt.

Fiona Button's Isabelle is one of the evening's successes: innocent, spirited and at her brightest when she's helping Leigh Lawson's billionaire to rip up the banknotes he's come to find burdensome. It's a futile gesture - but typical of the play's odd, diverting mix of cynicism and fairytale fun.

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