A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces

<i>Smoking With Lulu</i> | Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

The silent movie legend Louise Brooks, and the far-from-silent theatre critic Kenneth Tynan both set out to be breathtaking, and succeeded in spades. Later, though, by a pointed irony on which Janet Munsil's new play Smoking With Lulu productively seizes, the breath was taken from them. Puffing cigarettes had been a stylish way of life: now the habit was pointing the way to dusty death. But, with the noblesse oblige of the glamorous, the two of them faced their ends with stoic aplomb.

The silent movie legend Louise Brooks, and the far-from-silent theatre critic Kenneth Tynan both set out to be breathtaking, and succeeded in spades. Later, though, by a pointed irony on which Janet Munsil's new play Smoking With Lulu productively seizes, the breath was taken from them. Puffing cigarettes had been a stylish way of life: now the habit was pointing the way to dusty death. But, with the noblesse oblige of the glamorous, the two of them faced their ends with stoic aplomb.

At one point, Peter Eyre's uncannily accurate 51-year-old Tynan contemplates the smoke he has exhaled. "I'm creating," he declares with the artful pause of the dandy-stammerer, "atmosphere." So, too, does David Giles's fine production of this likeable if weakly structured drama.

Tynan and Brooks met for the first time in 1978. She was an arthritis-ridden recluse in Rochester, NY, who had turned her gorgeous but fastidious back on the movie industry some 40 years earlier. He was, for health reasons, an expat in California under contract to The New Yorker. The play focuses on the three days the pair spent together when he visited her to gather material for a long and wonderful profile. Munsil's play would have done itself a big favour, though, if it had pointed up the parallels and differences between its real-life scenario and the plot of Sunset Boulevard. In that movie, an aspiring hack is holed up with a silent movie legend who is desperate to make a comeback and has an unfilmable, talentless screenplay. In Smoking With Lulu, a very gifted writer finds himself in intense conjunction with an icon who has a witheringly realistic view of the movie business and is no mean writer herself.

It's a shaky play, but a deeply enjoyable evening, thanks to astute and adventurous casting. Fans of Thelma Barlow's immortal Mavis on Coronation Street might think that casting her as Louise Brooks is a bit like hiring Thora Hird to impersonate Liza Minnelli. Barlow, though, is an extremely gifted actress, so it should be no surprise that she gives us a charismatic and convincing Brooks, frail but wiry, and equipped with the witty, cigarette-stubbing dogmatism of the born diva.

It can't be easy playing this woman in old age when the real, unwithered thing is up there on the screen above her, radiating enough sex-appeal to keep an average harem going for a decade, or when Tynan's fantasy of Lulu, Brooks's most famous role, wafts about the stage, seductively reincarnated by the striking young actress Sophie Millett. But Barlow pulls it off. You are reminded a little of Miss Havisham, though a Miss Havisham who has dumped the men herself and taken the precaution of enslaving a doting female neighbour to do the dusting. Eyre's Tynan is the perfect foil to this creature, an underlyingly sad, self-consciously Wildean figure as drawn to plinths with superstars on them as dogs are to lamp-posts, if for directly opposite ends.

To 2 Dec (0113-213 7700)