Simon Gray's "Common Pursuit," by Roundabout Theater Company The oenophile takes a sip of wine and pronounces judgment: "This is simultaneously bland and acid. Is it English? Since the taster is a man of rigorous values, a Cambridge don who lets nobody and nothing off the hook, he might well apply similar words to the play in which he appears: "The Common Pursuit," Simon Gray's 1984 portrait of tarnishing ideals among a group of young literati, which opened on Thursday night in an unconvincing revival at the Laura Pels Theater. First staged in New York in 1986, with a juicy cast of rising young actors that included Nathan Lane and Dylan Baker, "The Common Pursuit" is indeed both bland and acid, and as gratifyingly - or irritatingly - English as "Downton Abbey." It's a decades-crossing, literate soap opera, full of the tinkle of casually dropped famous names and chiming wit. And there can be pleasure in observing the patterned workings of a fate through which every character fulfills his or her destiny exactly as you might expect. In other words, cast and paced with care, "The Common Pursuit" can be quite satisfying for American Anglomaniacs, rather like a crisply written summer beach read from across the pond. So the timing of this Roundabout Theater Company production, opening on the threshold of summer, feels auspicious. Unfortunately, this revival - rather like the intellectual undergraduates portrayed onstage - never fulfills even its modest promise. Simon Gray (1936-2008) was a specialist in rueful comedies of lost illusions, usually set in intellectual landscapes like the groves of academe or book publishing. Though often dismissed by British critics as a boulevard playwright, Gray at his best (which includes "Butley," "Otherwise Engaged"and "The Late Middle Classes") created stinging studies in the ambivalence that paralyzes people whose talents fail to match their standards. As a character in "Pursuit" says forlornly of his academic pursuits, "I diminish what I admire." The speaker of that withering verdict is Humphry Taylor, the same fellow who quipped about the bad wine. Portrayed by Tim McGeever, Humphry is also the conscience of "The Common Pursuit" and the essence of what can go wrong in this play. Humphry, you see, is a man of infallible insight, who accurately predicts the character-determined fate of pretty much everyone he knows, including himself. The problem is that from the first scene - set in the Cambridge rooms of an undergraduate named Stuart Thorne (Josh Cooke) - so can we. On the one hand, this is flattering to the audience, implicitly putting us on the same level as the smartest guy in the room; on the other hand, when everyone in a play remains so faithfully true to type, a certain ennui sets in, unless there are diversions like richly detailed, individualized acting. Such diversions are seldom offered by this cast, whose members tend to pick out one salient trait and ride it like a merry-go-round pony. You wind up thinking of their characters in adjectives that begin with capital letters. Stuart, the founder of a literary magazine that gives the play its title (itself taken from a book by the critic F. R. Leavis), is Uncompromising; his girlfriend (and later wife), Marigold Watson (Kristen Bush), is Long-Suffering; his loyal friend and publisher, Martin Musgrove (Jacob Fishel) is, well, Loyal - to a Fault. The road to middle age followed by these characters - along with the Womanizing Peter Whetworth (Kieran Campion) and the Fatuous (and Alcoholic) Nick Finchling (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe) - is a well-traveled one. We first meet them in 1968, when they are university students of ambition, ideals and potential. Subsequent scenes (with changes in their inhabitants" status signaled efficiently by ingenious variations in Derek McLane's single set) skip ahead to 9 years later, then 12, until finally we wind up in 1983 or 4. By then ambition, ideals and potential have all shrunk like slogan-bearing T-shirts left too long in the dryer. We have also reached a point when what is being discussed is not the formation of a magazine but the funeral of one its original contributors. Then, wouldn't you know, we skip back to that first meeting to remind us of what was lost. As I said, there are satisfactions to be derived from this formula. These include listening to gossip that weaves in the destinies of characters whom we never meet in person but enjoying hearing about, like the ferocious feminist novelist who writes about her menstrual cycles, and the talented, annoying poet who is Nick's nemesis. And the actors here all land their epigrams - some of which are eminently quotable - with clarity. But aside from Ms. Bush, though she has the most underwritten role, none of them seem engaged emotionally by their parts. Under the direction of Moisés Kaufman ("33 Variations," "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo"), each performance is drawn in the sort of thick, quick strokes that might be used for literary caricatures in The New York Review of Books. For example, Mr. Near-Verbrugghe's Nick, an inveterate smoker, always enters (and exits) coughing, and it's such a cartoon of a cough that you never really fear for his health. Similarly, despite instances of annihilating betrayal and deception, you never feel much sympathy for those who are wounded by such behavior. And if the revelations of hidden loves among these close friends surprise you, it's only because the actors have never given us any glimmer of such emotions. News of their fates, and even the present-tense unfolding of them, seems to arrive from a distance, second- or third-hand, rather like the scuttlebutt on that feminist novelist. When speaking of the suicide of someone he knew only as a comic abstraction, Humphry says, "People we convert into jokes have an obligation not to do that sort of thing." Any similarly confused feelings are not a problem with this revival. No matter how self-destructive its characters act, we're in no danger of taking them too seriously. The Common Pursuit By Simon Gray; directed by Moisés Kaufman; sets by Derek McLane; costumes by Clint Ramos; lighting by David Lander; music and sound by Daniel Kluger; dialect coach, Deborah Hecht; fight director, Thomas Schall; production stage manager, Bryce McDonald; production manager, Aurora Productions; general manager, Nicholas J. Caccavo; associate managing director, Greg Backstrom; associate artistic director, Scott Ellis. Presented by the Roundabout Theater Company, Todd Haimes, artistic director; Harold Wolpert, managing director; Julia C. Levy, executive director. At the Laura Pels Theater, Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, 111 West 46th Street, Manhattan; (212) 719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Through July 29. WITH: Kristen Bush (Marigold Watson), Kieran Campion (Peter Whetworth), Josh Cooke (Stuart Thorne), Jacob Fishel (Martin Musgrove), Tim McGeever (Humphry Taylor) and Lucas Near-Verbrugghe (Nick Finchling).