DIRECTOR Nicholas Hytner clearly knows his audience. And, at first glance, his choice of Alys, Always, adapted by Lucinda Coxon from Harriet Lane’s popular novel, seems set to please.

The story is simple. Frances, a busy but put-upon subeditor for Sunday newspaper The Questioner, is driving back to London one night after a miserably mundane Christmas with her miserably mundane parents, when she happens upon a car accident in a lonely country lane.

It changes her life, catapulting her into a world of privilege and unimaginable advancement — an effortlessly arrogant honeypot around which the good and great ceaselessly buzz. The victim, it transpires, is Alys, wife of Booker prizewinner Laurence Kyte and, through her dying words, Frances gains access to the Kytes. A Cinderella story for the times, indeed.

Confident and stylish, the production makes imaginative use of video projection, with the tightly focused working areas coming and going. But mostly we are aware of a disturbingly wide-open space which somehow reflects the moral blankness of the play.

Joanne Froggatt as Frances winningly commands the stage — she is one of “us,” an outsider to the privileged and recognisable “them.” Through her, we identify the behavioural quirks of the mighty and are cheered by their flaws. We laugh at the newspaper hierarchy and are tickled by their familiarity.

But the play misses an open goal. For where this linear tale of rags to riches could genuinely lambast undemocratic exclusivity – think the over-powerful Cameron Cotswold Set or the Eton elite – it instead settles for passive enjoyment of celebrity power, as if it were an essential but lovable fixture in our lives.

As Frances loses her identity to become “one of them,” the ordinary person is junked in favour of the famous. And nothing is jeopardised, challenged or changed.

Robert Glenister is perfectly cast as Laurence, who exists in a complacent moral vacuum, while Sam Woolf and Leah Gayer, as the dreadful Kyte offspring, hilariously remind us of the terrible mediocrity that privilege can foster.

Sylvestra Le Touzel, Jeff Rawle and Simon Manyonda wonderfully create the jaundiced environment of a national newspaper, while Froggatt progresses from quivering mouse to high-heeled dominatrix with riveting skill.

But the premise of the play, “don’t beat them, join them,” is a cop-out. The comedy may be well-observed but the vindication of self-seeking is a sadly predictable trope.

Runs until March 30, box office: bridgetheatre.co.uk