Don Juan, Crucible Theatre, Sheffield

Don Juan behaving badly

Pared to 80 minutes and light on its feet, Michael Grandage's production of Molière's play is never less than engaging. The racy adaptation by Simon Nye, of Men Behaving Badly, is amusing and pointed – it opens with the Don's servant, Sganarelle, declaring, with modern-day blasphemy: "If you don't smoke, you're wasting your life, basically.''

The set is by Christopher Oram, master of the "spare but evocative'': a bare piazza with flesh-coloured walls covered in beautifully toned patches of decay. But this morality tale is more of an amuse-bouche than a hot dinner, and not only because the Don's Spanish conquests number a thousand fewer than in the opera.

It's set in the present (Don Juan wears white trousers and open-necked white shirt and a straw hat), and the translation is agreeably cheeky when its hero indulges in the eternal pastime of finding, seducing and forgetting women – "I'm not a commitment person.'' But when it runs up against such 17th-century constructs as damnation and family honour, the play is haunted by the spectre of Blackadder, whom Tom Hollander in the title role recalls with his sudden shouts, hand-rubbing and air of sullen, ineffectual imperviousness.

Clearly this actor has some strange power over directors, having been cast as the fatally beautiful Alfred Douglas in The Judas Kiss and now the greatest swordsman of the stage. Whatever it is, it doesn't come over in his looks, closer to garden gnome than grand seigneur, or his voice and manner, those of a smirking sixth-former, offering compliments and excuses as though he doesn't expect to be believed and doesn't care. Watching the diminutive Hollander cavort with two infatuated girls to whom he has separately each proposed marriage is a sight as unattractive as it is unlikely.

Grandage may have meant, by this casting, to emphasise the social aspect of the Don's fascination, a reverence for aristocracy that makes personal allure irrelevant. And, where the local lads' idea of fun is "chookin' lumps of earth at each other's heads,'' one can imagine the pulling power of anyone who talks in complete sentences and wears shoes. But how to explain his fascination for Donna Elvira, a lovely, convent-educated girl of his own class? Difficult, also, to credit Lucy Briers – scrawny, pale, reserved – as a peasant who arouses the Don's lust as well as his competitive spirit.

Anthony O'Donnell is gen-uinely earthy as the servant contemptuous of his master, and Robert East is bone-chillingly austere as the proud, starving beggar. However, the superficial tone and weightless-ness of much of the acting make this a Don Juan lite.

To 20 Oct 2001 (0114-249 6000)