The Jermyn Street Revue is like a retirement home for jokes. "There goes that old Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch on crutches," you find yourself thinking, or: "That Tom Lehrer Vatican Rag was wonderful in its day, but the spark has gone out of its eyes - must be the valium. And as for those Pinter sketches, wouldn't it be better just to have one long pause?" The evening reminds you of the literal meaning of nostalgia, from the Greek nostos, a return home, and algia, pain. Pain because, despite being much younger than those for whom these sketches were a genuine return to their roots, I really wanted the jokes to work, having sadly spent several evenings playing Tom Lehrer songs and listening to recordings of Cook and Moore.

How has director Sheridan Morley created this failure? He has assembled a fine comic cast, including Frank (Are You Being Served) Thornton, the fragile yet classy Judy Campbell, Stefan (An Evening With Flanders and Swann) Bednarczyk, and Sophie-Louise Dann from the recent Dick Barton successes. But despite the high-quality components, you suspect that most of the laughs come from memories of the originals rather than the performances here. Jonathan Cecil brings a certain life to the mad Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling (or is that Greeb-Streebling?) with his doomed mission to make ravens fly under water, but cannot capture the raving eccentricity of Cook's original. And the cast is just too "in your face" to make Lehrer's songs work, provoking only a fraction of the possible laughs.

The problem is that revue jokes need either to come from the mouth of a comic genius or to flirt with taboos of the time. Few of the sketches are clever enough to drag the audience back to the Fifties when innuendo was up everyone's alley, and you end up feeling mauled rather than provoked. You can see why the publicist seemed more interested in getting celebrities into the press night than critics: the harsh light of criticism brings out too many wrinkles  - far better the soft focus of fond memory.