Swallows and Amazons, Vaudeville Theatre, Seven magazine review It may be a cliché beloved of theatre critics, but there is no such thing as a show for all the family. What amuses mother seldom amuses father, and on the rare occasions that they are both amused, it would be nothing short of miraculous if the children were, too - even if they were all of precisely the same age, gender and temperament. This is what struck me on Monday night, sitting among a restless audience watching Swallows and Amazons in the death throes of the festive season, as a woman in front of me hissed at her whining little boy to keep quiet and, three seats along, a middle-aged man, who'd had quite enough of it all, had taken refuge in sleep. This production of the author's best-known novel, adapted by Helen Edmundson, won rave reviews when it opened at the Bristol Old Vic in 2010. It is supposed to be fabulously inventive with its rolls of blue tape doubling up as sea, blokes walking around the stage flapping their arms about to simulate birds, and little boys going about on bits of wood on wheels pretending to be rowing. Inventive can, however, be a euphemism for a show done on the cheap. After a while, I yearned just to see a boat. I didn't even get a proper car in Driving Miss Daisy last year, for heaven's sake, and now I have got improvised boats in a story that is only about boats and children. One might add that one of the children isn't even a child: Stewart Wright is a big burly bloke, who must be 40 if he is a day. It's all about how you look at things, of course, and it is all very well for critics to praise a show at its glamorous West End opening. They should go along, as I did, to see how it feels a couple of weeks into the run when the theatre smells of damp old socks. The director, Tom Morris, one of the people who was responsible for War Horse, is normally quite good, but this whole thing struck me as an exercise in enforced jollity - which is also its fundamental flaw. The trouble with jollity is that it can never be enforced. To Jan 14, then touring UK to May 19; www.swallowsamazons.co.uk This review also appears in SEVEN magazine, free with The Sunday Telegraph