Great Expectations often yields low dividends when transposed to the stage, and the return on the audience's investment of time and money dwindles alarmingly as this lumbering production heads towards the three-and-a-half hour mark. It shouldn't be like this. Dickens was a great storyteller, and a production should have us rooting for Pip, feeling his pain as his hopes turn to dust.
The fact that we don't is in part due to James Maxwell's 20-year-old adaptation. While it offers plenty of potted plot, it never finds the heart of the story any more than Jacob Murray's clumsy production where even a slap is not a slap and the dialects sound as if they come from the Worzel Gummidge school of drama. We simply pass from one episode to the next, failing to engage emotionally with Pip, plucked from the blacksmith's forge to the drawing room of disappointed Miss Havisham and her heartless adopted daughter, Estella, and then propelled into polite society by the felon-turned sheep-farmer, Magwitch.
There is only one scene when we see inside Pip's psyche: we glimpse him standing between the warm glowing forge and the gates of Miss Havisham's house, caught between the world into which he was born and the world into which he passes. The production needs far more of that kind of tension. All we get is dry ice, some comic turns and a dull trudge through the main plot points. It is a GCSE crib guide on legs.
· Until April 10. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
