NEARLY a quarter of a century ago, in Wyndham's Theatre on London's West End, Mary McCarthy's comedy seemed theatrically like a farcical lumphammer brought to bear on the soft intellectual target of the Catholic church. A succession of grotesquely amplified caricatures offered as representative examples of how the female pupils went through the 5th year in their London convent school was perceived as shockingly funny, and it proved immensely popular in that place at that time.

On Monday night, here, it was greeted by a large and appreciative audience with gales of laughter and punctuated by thunderclaps of applause from time to time. But the Catholic church has moved on a great deal since the 1950s (in which the play was set) and the laughter seemed nostalgic, the applause recognition for the performers extricating themselves from embarrassing situations.

The days when "passion-killer" knickers and hell-fire priests not to mention the impurity of tampons or the misplaced innocence of pubescent girls - could be treated as a laugh have gone. Education has become necessarily darker and more thoughtful since then. The caricatures of Ms McCarthy's play are now antiques.

Roy Marsden's is brisk and efficient and Poppy Mitchell's setting richly functional. The acting is, for the most part, proficient and professional, and it is scarcely surprising that rounded characters cannot be drawn from a glib script. It is greatly to the credit of Claire Nicholson that she has managed to draw from the idiotically innocent persona of Mary Mooney a final scene (aided by Helen Ryan's Mother Thomas Aquinas) which is almost touching. For those who have not seen it, here is an antique piece of theatre which can be enjoyed, but not quite in the way in which it was originally intended.