Peter Hall has an extraordinary gift for reviving old classics just in time for them to coinicide with events in the body politic. He did it with Wilde's An Ideal Husband and now he seems to have struck again with Shaw's Major Barbara - with all its talk of arms sales and moral debates on mammon versus ethics.

Not that Hall's otherwise tremendous production is entirely able to disguise some of Shaw's more lumbering tricks - exploitation of the workers filtered through a dreadful kind of cloth-cap, My Fair Lady cliche - though even these have a validity. Scrap-heap redundancy and downsizing are not exclusive to our own day. In Major Barbara, however, Shaw has still given us one of the best, if mischievously slanted, discussions on the profit-making motive overlaid by a cynicism that wickedly questions its alternative - altruistic philanthropy.

One can never be quite sure whether Shaw sees Major Barbara's zealous good-works as so much posturing - and in Jemma Redgrave's quiescent, not yet quite convincing account of his Sally Army saviour, the signals are certainly ambiguous.

No such doubts, however, about the play's main antagonists - Peter Bowles's maverick rags-to-riches millionaire arms manufacturer, Andrew Undershaft and David Yelland's bespectacled Greek professor and Major Barbara anomorata, Adolphus Cusins.