At the end of Jean Anouilh's Wild Orchids, I was left asking one rather major question. Why revive this 60-year-old fairy-tale romance?

It is painfully slow, taking half the performance time to set up the premise.

And you know the ending almost as soon as the curtain opens.

There are no star performances. I caught a matinee and found actress Patricia Routledge curiously underpowered - so much so, I feared she might not be well.

Former Oscar-winner Michael Jayston has so little to do - maybe a score of lines in the whole thing - that he is reduced to slack-jawed wandering around the stage.

This is a great shame, because the stars, who both live in Sussex, are capable of much, much better.

As to the premise of the play: Two years before it starts, Albert, nephew to the Duchess, spent three days with a singer and fell madly in love with her.

When she died by strangling herself with a scarf, he grieved so morbidly his aunt thought he might kill himself.

To prevent this, she buys all the fixtures and fittings of those three days - an old taxi, an ice-cream stall, an inn and the nightclub where the couple drank - and erects them in the park of her own estate.

As a final straw, she hires a young milliner, who is identical to the singer to come to the castle to meet Albert and, hopefully, allow him to find love once more. Albert resists but you can guess the ending.

With Patricia Routledge as the Duchess and Jayston as the Baron, I did hope for finer things.

Sure it is still funny, the unusually-named Timberlake Wertenbaker has done this translation and tells some pretty good jokes. Unfortunately, they are not so good as to bring the play alive.

Catherine Walker's Amanda is engaging as is the young Albert of Andrew Scarborough, even if his voice often cracked.

But Wild Orchids, titled Time Remembered in its one-off London run in the early Fifties, is far too slight a piece.

Where it once might have been seen as avant garde, it now looks dusty and dated.

For tickets, call 01243 781312.