Larkin with women, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

Too much Larkin around

As one of his lovers said about Philip Larkin, "I'd pity anyone who married him. They'd have had a hell of a time". Too right. Ben Brown's Larkin With Women offers a series of snapshots of Larkin's unlikely emotional involvement with not one but three women. It was all more irksome, even painful, than a bit of a lark, as the celebrated poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian – the "Don Juan" of Hull, as he put it – discovered. Emotional involvement with Monica, Maeve and Betty is, however, an exaggeration. Larkin – competent librarian and highly regarded poet – comes across as emotionally stunted, behaving towards women like a small boy playing with toys, and laying the blame for his antipathy towards marriage fairly and squarely on his parents.

With its scruffy old sofa, bundle of 78s, drinks table and (unaccountably) peeling wallpaper for Larkin's house, Matthew Wright's 1950s set gives the clever impression of being sepia-tinted. The revolving stage turns to reveal life within the book-lined walls of the Brynmore Jones Library at Hull University. Gusts of Dixieland and swing, along with snatches of Larkin's lines on tape, fill in some of the gaps in this picture-album play, directed by Brian Brady, in which the poet is uncomfortably fleshed out as "one of those old-type natural fouled-up guys", as Larkin wryly said his fictitious American biographer would describe him.

Unanswered questions hang in the air in this one-dimensional – or rather three-dimensional – view of Larkin. What could glamorous Monica (a feisty Sally George), who once lectured on Macbeth wearing tartan, and who breezed down to a hotel dinner in pyjamas, have seen in him? Why would gentle Catholic Maeve (touchingly played by Gilly Tompkins) have retained such an affection for someone so selfish and inward-looking?

And it's hard to detect the redeeming features that his briskly efficient and rather jolly secretary Betty (effectively portrayed by Carolyn Pickles) points out Larkin must have had in order for three intelligent women to remain attracted to him. Perhaps a sequel could focus on the women's side of their relationship with Larkin, and how, if not exactly a sensational sex romp, four was surely a crowd.

Christopher McHallem's peculiarly tonsured pate turns Larkin's baldness into an unnatural oddity. His edgy, rasping delivery misses the poet's lugubrious, laconic streak, and there's hardly a smidgeon of tenderness or amiability to engage the audience's sympathy. The women grow old convincingly, but McHallem's acquisition of one, then another, hearing-aid is scarcely credible as an ageing process. Resorting to a cantankerousness worthy of Victor Meldrew, McHallem makes you want to shout "Get a life!" – a reaction I suspect Larkin himself might have aroused.

To 26 October (0113 213 7700)