It's played fast and furiously, with the actors often speaking over each other: just a bit too much gabbling energy lost a lot of priceless lines and cross-century mal-entendu.

Back from her fantasy dinner party, Marlene veers between attractively go-getting and glancingly callous. The trade-off between personal advancement and morality is at the core of Churchill's dramatic tension, but it's rescued from prissiness by the acid wit of the career women, meditating on how they've made it. "Ah'm very friendly, like," muses her ambitious Geordie co-worker, "ah'm just not very nice." 

Disaster looms with Marlene's belated duty visit to the shabby rural home of her grim-faced, irksomely defeatist sister Joyce (Stella Gonet), struggling with a dim teenage daughter Angie (Olivia Poulet). It's a mounting disaster of social unease and doomed attempts to cross the burning bridge of differing experience, dispositions and ideology.

The final slanging match between Marlene and Joyce is, as a good row on stage should be, riveting and draining to watch. Angie follows her beloved Marlene to London and aspires to follow her into the world of swivel chairs and glass-topped office tables. "She won't make it," snaps Marlene, a line all the more shocking because we know it is as true of the Angies of today as it was of the era of stilettos and Frascati lunches.

Blow wind, lash ye rains and bring on the moody magician with the daughter-fixation: The Tempest is squalling away in a new production at the Haymarket Theatre. It's a play that suffers from an architectural flaw of a lot of tale-telling longueur in the first half, leaving the real magic and pathos for the second.