Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Playhouse, London

Christopher Hampton's famous adaptation of Laclos's epistolary novel has been cursed by good fortune: Howard Davies's original 1985 production was so perfect that few have dared tackle the play since. And, although Tim Fywell's revival has its strengths, it misses the comic irony that pervades Hampton's scintillating text.

Irony may seem a strange word to use of a story about vicious sexual destruction. Egged on by his ex-mistress, the Marquise de Merteuil, the Vicomte de Valmont first heartlessly seduces a convent-educated virgin and then attracts and ruinously discards a provincial magistrate's strait-laced wife. But the contemptible use of people as pawns in a game of sexual chess is offset by a dark humour. When, for instance, Valmont protests that he needs more time to conquer the provincial wife, the Marquise quietly replies: "The century is drawing to its close, Vicomte." A line originally invested with devastating sardonic languour by Lindsay Duncan is here delivered by Polly Walker as if it were a severe reprimand.

Walker has a strong sexual presence but she plays the Marquise too much as a rich, soap-opera bitch and too little as a woman who masks her desperation under a suave mockery. Jared Harris fares better as Valmont, at first drily relishing the tactics of seduction and then finding himself shocked at his own emotional vulnerability. And the swan-necked Emilia Fox gives a decent account of the provincial puritan slowly surrendering to Valmont's sexual siege warfare.

But the best performance by miles comes from Dilys Laye in the little-regarded role of Valmont's aunt. She has poise, style and seems to have emerged from an 18th-century French salon rather than the streets of modern London; and when she tells her nephew's victim "men enjoy the happiness they feel, we can only enjoy the happiness we give" the line is freighted with a lifetime's emotional experience. This is real acting and captures that note of wry aristocratic sophistication elsewhere lacking in Fywell's workmanlike, straight-up-and-down production.

· Until March 24. Box office: 020-7369 1785.