The intimate in-the-round Orange Tree has, under the artistic directorship of Paul Miller, taken to staging rather more new and recent plays as well as rediscovering neglected 20th-century pieces; it also has a taste for golden-age farces, pepped up by live Foley work. Much further back beyond this, however, I am beginning to suspect that it is inadvisable to go. There is something about its space that I fear militates against more artificial performance.

The late John Fowles’ adaptation, here receiving its première production, dates from 1983, but is set in what he calls Jane Austen’s Regency, and its source is a century older still, Pierre Marivaux’s Le jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730). Young noblewoman Sylvia decides to undertake a discreet examination of her arranged husband-to-be on his first visit by changing places with her maid Louisa; unbeknownst to them (though not to Sylvia’s father and brother), Mr Richard and his manservant Brass have done likewise, so that the two couples fall in love whilst ignorant of each other’s true status. Its romantic sentiments and language, particularly between Sylvia and Richard, are polished to a high sheen.

Miller and designer Simon Daw have decided to present this on a stage bare but for an overhead arrangement of tealights and roses and a large roundel on the floor. Since almost every exchange in the play is a duologue, the antagonists seem to do little more than circle each other as if looking for an opening in a knife-fight, or like the flyballs on a steam engine’s governor. The Orange Tree space makes clocking the audience on asides look excessively contrived, which particularly penalises Claire Lams’ otherwise lively performance as Louisa. Fowles’ version is linguistically conservative, even going so far as to render Brass’s lines phonetically; the manservant should obviously be a bit of a wide boy, but perhaps not quite as broad as the Thames estuary at high tide, and Keir Charles is not to be blamed for his gorblimeying. Dorothea Myer-Bennett and Ashley Zhangazha work both assiduously and charmingly as the central couple, but what keeps us engaged is attributable principally to Marivaux rather than either Fowles or Miller and co.

Written for the Financial Times.