Both halves speculate about a moment in Wilde's life of which little is known.The first act admits us to the tragically temporary cocoon of the room Wilde took refuge in at the Cadogan Hotel in the tense hours between the collapse of his libel case against Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensbury, and his own arrest. The drama is shaped on a structure of two acts, whose points of contrast and comparison are brought out with intelligence and delicate lyricism in Richard Eyre's production. Which is a bit of a handicap, given that Hare's theme - continuing a preoccupation evident in his last two plays, Skylight and Amy's View - is the power (for good and ill) of consuming love. The electricity he generated with his future partner, Natasha Richardson, made the relationship between, say, William Hurt and Kathleen Turner in Body Heat look almost stand-offish.The chemistry between Neeson and Hollander, by contrast, fails utterly to warm this Almeida production transplanted to the proscenium-arch Playhouse It begins at zero and climbs into negative figures. As anyone who saw his performance as the powerful sexy stoker in the New York transfer of Anna Christie will testify, commanding attention in a theatre comes as naturally to him as commanding the best table in certain restaurants must. Hollander is so inhuman and mechanical as Bosie that the pair keep reminding you of a ventriloquist and his dummy.

Equip this Lord Alfred with a monocle and you'd have what looks like the late 19th century's answer to Ray Allen and Lord Charles: "Say 'bottle of absinthe', Bosie!" "Gottle of agsinthe, gottle of agsinthe.," It would, of course, have to be something classier than the proverbial beer. Neeson, by contrast, could run masterclasses in stage presence. But in the perpetual long-shot of theatre, there's not so much room for cover up. As the career of Alan Ladd so eminently proved, one advantage of Neeson's more regular medium, the movies, is that you can disguise inequalities of height by furtive use of ditches and boxes. This duo make a ludicrous spectacle: the six-foot four inch Neeson, who looks as though he could tear a telephone directory in half with his bare hands, and Hollander - here doing his over-familiar Dinky-toy petulant toddler routine - who would need to stand on several volumes of the telephone directory to get mouth-to-mouth with his strapping lover.

In The Judas Kiss, the new David Hare play about Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, he's on the receiving end of some passionate osculation from the Oscar of the Hollywood-wowing hunk, Liam Neeson. Yet you suffer for both actors in what turns out to be a bizarrely miscast and deeply disappointing evening. TOM HOLLANDER currently has one of the more enviable jobs in showbusiness, or so the vast majority of women - and not a few men - might assume. It is something thoroughly modern and part of the on-going negotiations between the genders about what women want and how men are going to have to accommodate those changes.You may mock, but I put it to you that yet again the little girls have got it right and, now able to command $20 million a movie, young Mr DiCaprio certainly has..