The Green Bay Tree (Jermyn Street Theatre)

The spreading green bay tree in the Bible was a sign of wickedness and luxuriance, the Mayfair "lifestyle" offered, perhaps, by the sinister dilettante Dulcimer to his adopted son, Julian, who is tempted back to the straight and narrow by a pretty young girl, Leonora Vale, who works as a vet.

Such is the set-up, a battle for Julian's body and soul, in Mordaunt Shairp's riveting 1933 play which made a star of Laurence Olivier on Broadway (as Julian), revived here in a skilful, but rather fey, production by Tim Luscombe; one could imagine a sterner performance, as modern and rugged as Olivier surely must have been.

At the Jermyn Street, Christopher Leveaux is gossamer light and too puckishly middle-class as Julian, the Welsh boy whose singing voice won Dulcimer's heart at an Eisteddfod and led him to pay his father (a galumphing Celt who, according to Dulcimer, "runs a dairy or a drapery or something dreadful in Camden Town") £500. What has followed is a life of social and cultural grooming, fine wines and opera visits… until Leonora comes along.

Dulcimer could be played in a variety of ways and Richard Stirling has gone for the most difficult, and outrageous, choice. I think it's the wrong one, but there's no denying the conviction with which he makes Dulcimer an art deco lampshade, posing and preening like an upmarket John Inman in Are You Being Served?. He comes across as less a sexual predator than a celibate opera queen (he does karaoke to Chopin preludes) who probably speaks no less than the truth in saying that he needs Julian as a sort of accessory, for his youth, charm and companionship.

Luscombe and his designer, Gregor Donnelly, deliberately give the play a vague sense of style rather than a specific one, so we're never sure what decade we're in. The chaps sit down to dinner in cravats, the lugubrious manservant Trump (Alister Cameron) wears a grey buttoned-up lounge suit and Dulcimer calls up his dying swan music on a remote control.

Poppy Drayton, so pert and pretty as Madeleine Allsopp in the fourth series of Downton Abbey, offers a wake-up call as Leonora in her decisiveness, work ethic and unconditional devotion to Julian, but the green bay tree has cast a long shadow. The melodramatic resolution is not made to seem other than ridiculous, though I love the last chilling scene of rehabilitation and possession, worthy of Henry James.

The author, a one-play wonder, was a Hampstead schoolmaster who died in 1939. He obviously felt there was something unhealthy but deeply truthful going on, which makes this an important social document, if not a great drama. And our current naïve hysteria over abuse, grooming and under-age sex should not blind us to his vivid, humane description of what happens, how life is, for some people at least, then and now.

The Green Bay Tree continues at Jermyn Street until 21 December 2014