The first thing this play makes an impression with is its set.

An incredible verdant garden entirely fills the stage, complete with a huge beehive, apple tree, brightly coloured flowers and the sounds of twittering birds. It is a perfect metaphor for the middle England in which this play is set.

The story is focused around Felix Humble (Hugh Sachs), an astrophysics academic who returns to his family after seven years for his father's funeral.

His mother Flora (Hayley Mills) is vain, cold and disatisfied with life. Apparently untouched by her husband's death, she dallies with George (Paul Hecht), her lover of the past few years.

His daughter Rosie's (Carla Lang) heart was broken by Felix when he left all those years ago, made all the harder by some rather important imformation she has kept from him for all this time.

The first of many secrets to be revelealed, neither the premise nor the story are particularly original.

In that Tom Stoppard way, the story uses a much bigger picture to examine the minutiae of the characters' relationships, in this case, theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Whether this is entirely succesful or not is hard to fathom but it certainly gives the play lots of layers - as do metaphors about bees and flowers.

Perhaps overly complex, the first half is so concerned with setting up the intellectual stuff, the characters barely relate to one another. The ambiguity about where the story is going or what the point of it might be means the story drags.

The second half immediately perks up as writer Charlotte Jones' allows her ablity for comedy to shine through. The grace that Mercy (Brigit Forsyth), Flora's long-suffering friend, says at a dinner party is so perfectly written and performed, the laughter from the audience even drowns out its closing lines.

Emerging from it all is a sense of the characters' missing out on what life really has to offer by focusing on the wrong things but this feels somewhat buried under the play's mechanics.

Still, strong performances and spot-on characterisation means this is a story that remains long after the curtain comes down.

For tickets, call 01273 328488.