AS you laugh you almost forget the dark, ugly nature of this play

You might think that unlikely considering the story concerns a racist white old lady in America's deep south in the 1930s who is forced by her son to employ a black chauffeur.

But, believe it or not, the longer this gentle, nice, production rolls along the more engrossed you become in the idiosyncrasies of these two endearing characters.

The curmudgeonly old lady, performed by Angela Moran, gets a few laughs just for being suitably miserable about everything. And the chauffeur, Hoke, also elicits the odd chuckle with his takes on her behaviour. But the fascination of the play - like the acclaimed film - is in the development of their relationship. It's the telling moments, the odd touch or the occasional answer back from Hoke, that signals the change from suspicion to tenderness. But it's never obvious, never overstated - this is just too well written by American writer Alfred Uhry for that.

And it's just when we're finally lulled by those unlikely intimacies in their relationships when Uhry jolts us back to the reality of what the deep south was really about from the 1930s to the 1950s. There's the moment when Daisy is forced to confront the reality of anti-semitism. But the strongest and most ironic moment comes when the reformed Daisy wants to take Hoke to hear the great anti-racist Martin Luther King. She can't bring herself to be seen with a black man even as she goes to hear King speak.

Even that scene has an unspoken tenderness to it which is its own tribute to the actors who manage to grip the audience. That despite there being little or no action. The main criticism of the play is that it simply isn't long enough for those actors to develop those characters properly.

Staff at the Dukes will have been disappointed that the theatre was only half full on the opening night.

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