The mystery is why Michael Colgan (he who rules over the Gate with a rod of impressarial imagination) chose Ruth and Augustus Goetz's 1947 adaptation of Henry James's 1880 novel, Washington Square, as the preChristmas production for his august theatre. The surprise is that his choice turned out even halfway entertaining, with one beautifully controlled and perversely moving performance: Donna Dent's tightly emotional and emotionally damaged Catherine Sloper is worth seeing any time, even in a play as quaintly and creakily oldfashioned as this, dull in its dialogue and slim in its content.

Not even Michael Rudman's determined direction can deter laughter in scenes that were clearly not written to be funny, but this does not seem to matter very much theatrically in a piece in which disbelief must be suspended to the ultimate to allow a mixture of nearHollywood pastiche with vague echoes of A Doll's House and psuedo-Jane Austen social observance to seem convincing in a beautifully realistic setting by Eileen Diss, well lit by Joe Atkins and with the players excellently costumed by Sally Turner.

It's all about attitudes and caricatures: the women are all heart and the men are all head - at least until plain shy timid Catherine begins to show signs that she has inherited some of the unforgiving and unyielding qualities of her intimidatory father, Dr Austin Soper (a sturdily unsubtle Des Cave), whose wife died giving birth to his daughter. Her aunts - particularly the feather-headed widowed Lavinia Penniman (a fluttery Susan FitzGerald) - seem to favour the courting of the emotionally enigmatic Morris Townsend (Stephen Hogan), whom the sturdy doctor believes to be a mere fortune-hunter.

It is a slight evening, emphatically rescued by the depth and strength of Ms Dent's characterisation of its initially frail and ultimately steely heroine.