Give a famous actor his head and all too often he loses it. Making his directorial debut with this delectable eighteenth-century marital comedy and taking a star role, Nigel Hawthorne dilutes the play's sharp satirical essence to concoct a jovial, escapist romp instead. He himself turns in a likeable but curiously muted performance. The double duty of directing and starring, turns out to be too much. But the old-fashioned evening goes with an appealingly camp and light-hearted swing.
    OId fashion, however, is worlds away from the style of the play's producer, Thelma Holt, most adventurous and daring of West End impresarios. Having triumphantly returned Shakespeare to Shaftesbury Avenue after more than 50 years, Miss Holt presumably wanted to prove a rareish, English comic classic would work in the WestEnd.
    But since the Sixties there's been a revolution in the way seventeenth and eighteenth century comedy is produced.
    Directors have revealed real social cut and thrust beneath the surface fun.
    Yet Hawthorne's production is surface-bound: lurid costumes, fans and parasols, mummerset maids and enjoyable camp games with actors dressed up as hedges and bushes.
    There's scant realisation that the authors - David Garrick and George Coleman - were fiercely attacking nouveau riche merchants and thread-bare aristocrats who thought money made marriages and daughters were only worth their weight in gold.
    The scene is the upwardly mobile Mr Sterling's country home - a triumph of bad taste. But Timothy O'Brien's bareish stage set, all silver and grey, looks almost elegant.
    And Christopher Benjamin's Sterling never acts the rampant vulgarian who haggles over his two daughters, loosing them on the marriage market as if they were valuable livestock.
    Hawthorne also misses th� thoroughly English obsession with class.
    For The Clandestine Marriage simply deals with comic ructions when the secret marriage of the lowborn Lovewell - to Mr Sterling's daughter Fanny - is threatened by Sir John Melvil: this young knight abandons plans to marry Fanny's mercenary elder sister and makes an attractive fInancial bid for Fanny herself (a wan Elizabeth Chadwick).
    You would never guess Jonathan Cullen's Lovewell and Simon Chandler's Sir John are from different classes. And Mr Chandler makes Melvil romantic rather than sharply speculative.
    Deborah Findlay's Miss Sterling, nasal, henna-haired and gross, hankers with gorgeous comic effect for high life and lucre. Only a few farcical excesses let her down.
    BUT Susan Engel, as her aunt Mrs Heidelberg, for ever aspiring to gentility, has, in her black, high-standing wig, the louche vigour of a pantomime dame or drag queen. It's merely a vigorous comic turn.
    Lord Ogleby remains the satirical centre-piece: this rouged, tottering relic, an ancient Narcissus still trying to rise to romance's challenge, despite rheumatic joints, is deftly played with valiant, careful swagger by Hawthorne in lilac stockings and gaudy accessories.
    And there's a beautiful interjection of comic pathos when the wig slips to reveal the bald truth. But Hawthorne misses Ogleby's preening affectation and gleeful insincerity. Perhaps he's too truthful an actor for this mendacious role.