The Front Page, Festival Theatre, Chichester

A dream of mischief

Write a realistic work, Max Beerbohm said, and it will age before the ink dries; write a romance, and it will live for ever. So don't be fooled by the manual typewriters and the old-fashioned telephones: this charming classic satisfies not only everyone's fantasy of a force for good in a wicked world, but every boy's dream of full-time mischief.

Hildy Johnson and the other denizens of the Chicago criminal court's press room on the eve of an execution in 1928 are crude and cynical and hold human life less sacred than their deadlines – when the sheriff refuses to advance the hanging by two hours so that they can make the city edition, one reporter says sourly: "Just wait till you want a favour."

But when the mayor and sheriff suppress the governor's pardon (the hanging is the keystone of their "Reform the Reds with a Rope" campaign), we know that the condemned man's only hope is the news-hounds. Not, of course, that anything as pompous as truth or idealism is on their minds: stringing up a mayor instead of a nobody will sell more papers, and will be a lot more fun.

The American director, Douglas Wager, gives Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's comic valentine to their youth a loving production. John Gunter's dusty brown set is convincingly seedy, as are the restless newsmen playing poker and hiding from grown-ups – ie, women. (The criminal's attempts to escape the gallows are paralleled by the efforts of Walter Burns, Hildy's editor, to save his star reporter from the living death of marriage and a respectable job.) Robert Jezek is particularly amusing as a mordant newsman who's seen it all and doesn't like it much, as is Frank Lazarus as the fusspot who eats lettuce sandwiches and writes uplifting poetry.

After hearing one of these verses, Michael Pennington's Walter Burns, who at that point needs to please the poet, is silent for a moment, then declares: "It's heartbreaking", though his hand, more truthful, clutches his stomach. Unable to be at the opening-night, I attended a dozy, quarter-full matinée, and circumstances may have been to blame for the show's lack of tension. But Pennington, who appears late in the play, has all the energy it needs. Seething with menace for anyone who comes between him and a scoop (given permission to kiss Hildy's fiancée, he seems to bite her), Pennington is sparing with his movements, like a slow but still-powerful old lion. One arm jackknifed, elbow high, he leans into the telephone mouthpiece as if frustrated that he cannot maul the person at the other end. When a diabetic desk man is so disloyal as to visit the Gents, he growls: "I oughta know better than to hire anybody with a disease."

Adrian Lukis, though an attractive and personable Hildy, gives a lightweight, musical-comedy-style performance. He has the newsman's glee at stirring up trouble but not the killer instinct. The women, also, seem nervous of their parts: one, meant to be hysterical, hammers on Pennington's chest as if it were an egg she feared to break. But this pungent tale still casts a powerful spell, with its merry hell-raising, its lurid local colour and its snappy dialectics. "Humanity is a wonderful thing," the prisoner tells a prostitute, who immediately counters: "No it ain't."

To 13 July (01243 781312)