In Celebration, Duke of York's Theatre, London

"It's like a museum, this is!" says Andrew (Paul Hilton), back in his parents' Yorkshire home. "It hasn't changed in 500 years." The faded floral wallpaper, the unframed mirror, the protective covers on furniture any sane person would abandon to the elements - all these do look like exhibits in the Museum of Dull, but the play that inhabits this setting is something of a museum piece as well.

David Storey's drama of 1969 may be younger than most of the first-night audience, but already it seems a relic of a time when men were no good at expressing their feelings, and women weren't much better.

Andrew and his brothers, Colin (a sturdy Gareth Farr) and Steven (self-effacing Orlando Bloom), have returned to mark their parents' 40th wedding anniversary. But it is clear right away that their mother (Dearbhla Molloy) does not regard each son's arrival as something to celebrate. While Andrew and Steven, like their father (Tim Healy), get only a cheek tilted in their direction, mother rushes at Colin with open arms. The most successful of the sons, he manages an auto factory.

Andrew, a solicitor who has given up his career to paint, remains angry about an incident in his childhood and, in Hilton's rather busy performance, all bobbing head and wiggling fingers, still seems a restless youth. Steven, a writer, has dreams that make him cry in his sleep.

The father, at 64 still a coal miner, refuses to leave his job before mandatory retirement one year on, though he, too, is haunted - by the filth and danger of the pit. Needless to say, before the play is over, everyone will do some digging to undermine the family foundations.

Rhetorically, however, Storey has given his characters only a spoon with which to chip at four decades of resentment and guilt. The revelations wait till the end of the first act, then are prodded a bit in the second, without gaining in intensity or changing anyone. While one respects Storey's intention to write a drama as inconclusive and wayward as life, the result, at least in Anna Mackmin's sluggish production, lacks the tension and unease that one might expect from a long night of colliding egos.

The play also lacks the sympathy for women that would be expected of plays written a short time later. Mother is fingered as the family villain, a chilly expert in "domestic science" and "human hygiene." But the now-clichéd silent scream is Storey's only acknowledgment of her own pain. And some of the details of maternal contempt are droll - Steven, the youngest, had to stand at dinner because the family could afford only four chairs.

Amid all this mid-life anguish, the old people steal the show from the emotionally paralysed brothers. Healy's deliberate, hearty simplicity and Molloy's fierce restraint make a powerful double act, and Ciaran McIntyre and Lynda Baron provide amusing support as two garrulous neighbours, the former grandly offering to share his fallout shelter with the lady: "I shall take comfort in your good-natured incomprehension."