First Night: The Reporter, Cottesloe Theatre, London

Nicholas Wright's play begins with BBC correspondent James Mossman reading us his suicide note in Richard Eyre's production: "I can't bear it any more, though I don't know what 'it' is." For the rest of the drama, he investigates his own death, seeking to discover not only what made him kill himself in 1971 but what sort of person he was. But a man whose last words are self-deprecating and ironic is obviously buttoned up so tight that any search is likely to be frustrating - indeed, the more we learn about Mossman, the more walls we run into.

Homosexual in a conservative milieu, an objective commentator, and a part-time spy, Mossman was professionally, as well as emotionally, elusive. But a slippery character can still fascinate.

Unfortunately, Ben Chaplin, for most of the evening, stands with his arms folded across his chest and speaks in a guarded tone of voice. He's lovely to look at, but the lack of charm or command (at least one is a newsman's necessity) is obvious. In a programme note, Wright says that Mossman had a camp sense of humour, but we don't even see a straight one. With his "sensitive" monologues about the fields being "bleak with promise" or "the earth pulsating with new life" during "spring's effulgence," he fails to realise that horticulture does not bring out the best in him.

Mossman, however, isn't nearly so much of a pain as his lover, Louis, a young man whose disdainful, holier-than-thou pronouncements about Mossman's lack of artistic integrity are clearly motivated by envy.

The comments themselves are not without merit, but Louis is such an absurd, self-indulgent figure that the scenes in which he sabotages Mossman's work are comic. Or they would be if Mossman - and Wright?- didn't take him so seriously. It's difficult enough to remain interested in the unsympathetic central character's quest without our normal reactions being thwarted.

Fortunately, there are plenty of other characters, and Wright seems to have had as much fun in writing them as we have in listening to them. Bruce Alexander, as Mossman's producer, deftly creates the echt BBC man, twisted into a corkscrew of embarrassment by the reporter's "chum" but setting aside all squeamishness to be both kindly and practical at a time of pain and sorrow.

Paul Ritter does a hilarious impersonation of Robin Day, coming across as more appealing than the real one deserves.

Angela Thorne steals away with much of the show as Mossman's friend Rosamund Lehmann, who, as her novels are neglected, compensates with a terrifying grande-dame act and a sweeping announcement of her place in literary history: "I exposed the betrayal of intimate life," she declares, as if Freud were some minor foreign quack. Aleksandar Mikic, though, as a devil-may-care photographer, seems to spend the entire evening girding himself to spring rather than soaring into the wildness the part demands.

When Mossman changes his behaviour, he only creates more uncertainty. Does he browbeat Harold Wilson because Louis has shamed him into showing his true self, or is he forcing himself to do so in order to please Louis, or get him to ease off? The riddle doubles back and forth, but the man is too ghostly for us to care.