Theatre - A compelling, tragic tale of two men and their muse, writes Michael Portillo The Earthly Paradise Almeida Theatre, London N1

The love triangle, despite its geometric simplicity, can have complicated emotional effects. Peter Whelan's new play, The Earthly Paradise, takes its title from William Morris's collection of 24 classical and medieval tales published between 1868 and 1870. Morris's researches into ancient sagas took him twice to Iceland, leaving his wife, Jane, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti at Kelmscott Manor, the Oxfordshire house that the two men rented jointly.

It was Rossetti who had first seen Janey and at once pronounced her a "stunner". She became his model and his muse, perhaps more. Certainly, towards the end of his abbreviated life, Rossetti wrote to Janey that he felt for her a "feeling far deeper (though I know you never believed me) than I have entertained towards another living creature at any time of my life". According to Whelan, Rossetti did not marry Janey himself only because he was already engaged, and persuaded Morris to propose to her instead. Rossetti married Elizabeth Siddall, who was the model for Ophelia painted by John Everett Millais. Siddall died of an overdose of laudanum only two years after their wedding.

At the opening of the play, Rossetti and Janey are looking forward to their time alone together, though she is clearly nervous as well as excited. Morris is self- consciously jolly as he crashes about, boisterously preparing for his journey. But his elephantine movements scarcely mask his misery, for in truth he sees himself headed for "a bare precipice on the edge of the Arctic [to] sit there and howl". Only Rossetti seems happy, as well he might at the prospect of having the beautiful girl to himself, but his demeanour turns out to be the most deceptive of all. When Morris returns from Iceland, he is mystified to find that his wife and his friend, while keeping up appearances, cannot hide from him that they are miserable. The play's title has a deeply ironic ring.

Whelan was brave to write a script that needed to be worthy of two substantial poets such as Morris and Rossetti, but he pulls it off. The prose is gorgeous. In the opening scenes, Whelan treats us to beautiful evocations of Kelmscott. His characters talk lovingly and intelligently of the things they observe and the pictures they paint. Whelan perfectly weaves in similes that reflect their preoccupation with the chivalric legends. Morris laments that he "married Guinevere, trying to forget that in the story, Guinevere married the wrong man".

The actors speak like characters created by Henry James (whose first novels appeared at the time of the play's action). Janey comments that Morris "is going because of us. This is his gift to us." In Victorian England, where Rossetti's love for Janey might cause a catastrophic scandal, Morris offers them Kelmscott as their sanctuary. He does so, he tells them, for the sake of the wonderful work that painter and model will achieve together. He admits to himself that he was never worthy of her, and feels deeply inferior to his friend as an artist. Rossetti talked him into attempting painting as well as marriage, and Morris, finding that neither worked for him, turned to writing poetry and designing wallpaper.

Nigel Lindsay plays Morris as a gentle giant, a paunchy friendly fellow who galumphs about hugging "Gab" or beating himself on the temples with his fists when his intuitions come to him too slowly. But he is never oafish. He may consider himself sluggish by comparison with Rossetti, but he loves both him and Janey with delicacy and intelligence.

Rossetti lived on the edge of paranoia, prone to nervous breakdown and attempts on his own life. Alan Cox in the role of the artist holds back those revelations, but an acute observer would be suspicious of his excessive exuberance. He somehow fiz-zes joylessly. It is a fine performance. When he falls into a fit and then a faint, Cox contrives to look extremely ill, drained of colour.

Saffron Burrows looks like a Rossetti canvas come to life. She is as languid and vulnerable on stage as Janey is in the paintings. Janey was born into poverty. Whelan has her speak well and cleverly enough, but her conversation is on a more mundane level than the men's, and she is in awe of them. She worries about the dye in her dress running if she gets wet approaching the house by boat on the river rather than walking along the path. She is allowed to soar only in the later moments of the play when she laments that she did not seek to meet men such as Rossetti and Morris who "bow to me for the way I look". They are incapable of treating her for what she is and have made her "holy".

When Rossetti wrote that he had loved nobody as much as Janey, he added: "Would that circumstance had given me the power to prove this: for proved it would have been." It is on this intriguing phrase that Whelan bases the argument of his play and seeks to explain the misery of his three characters. Using language that consistently delights the ear, Whelan has written something very compelling, lovely and tragic.

Booking on 020 7359 4404 until 8 January

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