Sweet Nothings, Young Vic

Arthur Schnitzler belonged to a culture of inquiry and experiment, in which dreams and desire were crying out to be articulated and delineated; sexual needs were the unexplored stuff of life - how well Vienna painters like Klimt and Schiele knew this - and, as Freud worked it all out for us, not necessarily dangerous. Where better to bring this to flesh-and-blood life than on stage?

In London drama of the same era, from Wilde to Coward, men and women expected private confusion to be allayed by social solutions. Snobbery and repression, moreover, were good. In Schnitzler's Vienna, men and women hoped uninhibitedly to go to bed together. So it was a fair ask of the Young Vic to offer London at the very least an honest rendering of his piquant Liebelei (1895), rather than a merely facetious or underheated one.

Luc Bondy, directing, has given us something in between: a studied, stylish production, built on a highly accessible, attractively colloquial new translation as Sweet Nothings by playwright David Harrower. If it isn't as sexy as one might have hoped, it's wholly absorbing nonetheless, or at least it becomes so. Four party animals, Fritz, Theodore, Mizi and Christine, start the play flirting and feasting in a manner only the idle rich know how - the setting is more Waugh than Wilde - and I don't think I was alone in wondering where the hell the tippling, frivolity and foreplay (fully clothed) were headed. The first 30 minutes or so seemed incoherent.

Enter "A Gentleman" (an eerily still, Commendatore-like Andrew Wincott) to challenge a suddenly sober Fritz - Tom Hughes - to a duel. The youngster has been carrying on with the stranger's wife. The fun and games are over. The genuine love Christine - Kate Burdette - is nurturing for the feckless tike looks imperilled. His raffish best friend Theo (Jack Laskey) understands that death is a real possibility, and Mizi (Natalie Dormer), dead drunk, probably doesn't.

The play's second half pushes deeper into Christine's soul, and her anguish, yearning and dread of loss are really affectingly caught by Burdette: Sweet Nothings turns into her tragedy. She wants to break out; Fritz seems to be the answer to her dreams, but her musician father and a bourgeois neighbour, Katharina, are full of alarm and warning. It's a tribute to Bondy's by now superb pacing all through Act Two, and to Burdette's supple, unsentimental embodiment of innocence, that we suspect the inevitable - Fritz's demise - while praying, viscerally, that Christine avoids suffering.

The acting as a whole is a pleasure - Hayley Carmichael is a stentorian Katharina, David Sibley creepy as Christine's smothering father Weiring - but special praise must go to stage debutants Tom Hughes as Fritz and Natalie Dormer as Mizi. He is naturally charismatic, she entertainingly sassy, even lewd. Moidele Bickel's costumes are a joyful, luxurious complement to the actors. If Sweet Nothings doesn't smoulder, then that's because Bondy, with his designer Karl-Ernst Herrmann, has gone for a very beautiful look at the partial expense of probing psychology. Maybe more of the latter will become unburied as the show tours briefly in England, then headlines at the Vienna and Recklinghausen Festivals later in the spring.

• Sweet Nothings booking at the Young Vic until 10 April
• Tour goes on to Northampton 10-13 April,  Kingston 20-24 April, and Warwick 27 April-1 May.