Bliss, Belvoir

This is a show that just plain doesn't work. And the "not working" starts early, with the opening monologue. Adapting Peter Carey's novel is not necessarily a bad idea (it's worked perfectly fine as a film and as an opera) but it has a couple of iconic images that really should be attempted if you're going to adapt this properly. And the opening monologue captures one of these - the "vision splendid", of a woman traversing a flooded town carrying a giant crucifix. Except it's entirely narrated, by Toby Truslove and his particularly fidgety hands. And the monologue just lies there, dead on the stage, buried in Marg Horwell's tasteful pine set.

There are occasional moments when the story gets a little life in it - particularly Anna Samson's Honey Barbara (a character who should be a massive cliche - the earth-mother prostitute who liberates the bewhildered leading man) who gives the show a human energy that otherwise is missing in action most of the time - she feels real and lived in. The mental-hospital sequence at the beginning of Act Two also has a bit of life in it, particularly with Marco Chiappi as a guy who decides that he's going to go with the madness rather than fight against it in the most gleeful of ways.

But otherwise a skilled cast lies pretty much wasted under a boringly directed and adapted version of a classic novel. Novels absolutely can make great stage pieces - most recently, "Jasper Jones" and "The Secret River" brought their particular source material to life. But this is deadly theatre - giving no life to the ideas in the text, all very tasteful and careful but with no idea what the animating centre of the production is beyond "people liked this when it was a book". Whatever adapters Tom Wright (script) and Matthew Lutton (directing) thought they were doing, this is an almost complete failure - and, more embarrassingly, a failure shared between two different theatre companies. I feel great pity for everybody associated with it.