One of the most reliable things you can say about Northern Stage is that the company makes great films. If that sounds like a paradox, witness the opening five minutes here - a stunning panorama of sky and mud, in which the air of Dickens's novel is established before the actors have even been summoned from their dressing rooms.
What you do have to ask, however, is why the company brought its well-honed multimedia techniques to the novel in the first place. Director/designer Neil Murray explains in the programme that the suggestion came up in an email from the Arts Council about fulfilling the company's touring brief. A less compelling reason to create a new piece of theatre is hard to imagine.
Still, this is literary theatre of a superior cut, even if it pares the action so close to the bone that there's really only a skeleton of the novel left. Nick Ormerod and Declan Donnellan's recent RSC version came in at over three hours and was still accused of selling the book short. Murray's production knocks an hour off that, though it compensates with multi-layered imagery.
The production conceives Pip's career as a fragmented dream, dividing the character between Peter Peverley's muddy urchin and Matt Blair's callow gentleman. Both incarnations initially appear together, a useful conceit that enables Julia Dalkin's contemptuous Estella to spit out all the Pips at once.
Mark Lloyd is a menacing Magwitch, Mark Calvert a doggedly faithful Joe, and Jack Power a macabre Jaggers. Yet it's the phantasmal projections that make the strongest visual impression. It's chillingly beautiful but, like Sue Maund's emotionally desiccated Miss Havisham, one does have cause to wonder what became of its heart.
· Until January 28. Box office: 0114-249 6000. Then touring.
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