Tom And Viv, Almeida Theatre, London

Ace poet with a mad wife attached: 'Tom and Viv' is an Eighties thing

Man marries wife with mental problems, eventually has to have her committed to a home. Sad, but no story. Man and wife are Mr and Mrs T S Eliot. Is it a story now?

Throughout this revival of Michael Hastings's 1984 play, with its deceptively chipper title (these two are no Noel and Gertie, or Pat and Mike), we are at times invited to see the Eliots as the great poet and his mad muse, at others as typical victims of their time. Vivienne suffers from conditions that could have been easily treated a few decades later; her behaviour, to begin with, seems merely an exaggerated form of that expected from a woman of her comfortable and careless class when flippant baby dolls were in fashion. Her serious husband, fleeing his brash country for the older and more complex culture he reveres, mistakes tradition for civilisation.

Tom and Viv might even be a couple of today, she despairing and neglected, he wishing she would stop distracting him from his cantos - but no, the play is about a great artist, and therefore about art, or it is nothing. Why else choose the Eliots?

Hastings after all has had to invent the greater part of it, and what he invents is often concise and evocative - Viv's wealthy mother saying: "Her saving grace is that she knows nothing about money," or remembering the time she got a school prize for "the best Cockney accent in Tunbridge Wells."

Yet, while Viv asserts, "I am threaded through every line of poetry he wrote," we only see Eliot discomfited or exasperated by her. There is no suggestion of how Viv enriched and freed his creative life. And Hastings invents nothing that changes the unequal contest or the foregone conclusion. Absorbing in its first half, the play dies under its repetitiveness and inevitability in the second.

There is little to fault, though, in Lindsay Posner's production, one that, as best I can recall, surpasses in style and vitality the original at the Royal Court. Frances O'Connor deploys much charm, making each of Viv's many scenes of appalling-yet-pitiable behaviour different, each touching. She strikes one as a bit too graceful, though, and Will Keen's American accent, particularly in the last scene, is a bit Martian. Otherwise, he, along with Anna Carteret as Viv's mother, Robert Portal as her brother, Benjamin Whitrow as her father, and Laura Elphinstone as her nurse, are gripping without being overemphatic and touching without being sentimental.

For all the evocation of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, the time that seems most relevant to this play is the 1980s, when the controversy over intimate biography, the interest in the link between creativity and madness, and the fashion for writing about the silent partners of artists made Tom and Viv seem to be more important than it is, and therefore timeless.