How do you judge an adaptation? Usually by comparing it with the original. But, not having read Angela Carter's 1967 novel, I approached both Bryony Lavery's dramatisation of it and Rebecca Gatward's Shared Experience production with fresh eyes. I found them both coherent, lively and strange, though not without a touch of that mannered tricksiness you so often find in physical theatre.
Carter buffs will know the story backwards. The suddenly orphaned 15-year-old Melanie and her siblings are shunted off to live in south London with their mysterious Uncle Philip, a toymaker who rules his family, including his mute wife and her Irish brothers, with a rod of iron. He has a weird habit of staging basement shows blending humans and puppets (although that would now mark him out as a leader of the theatrical avant-garde). It is after one such show, in which Melanie plays Leda raped by a phallic swan, that all hell breaks loose and Phil's tyranny is finally overturned.
At first my heart sank: I thought we were going to be in for the kind of numbing literalness that often accompanies physicalised literary adaptations. "A black bucket of misery tipped itself over Melanie's head," we are told at one point - a perfectly clear image ruined by the sight of Melanie being covered in a bucketful of black feathers. But it is precisely when the show abandons the overillustrative, nursery-school approach that it begins to work. We never fully understand, for instance, what goes on inside the head of Melanie's obsessively ship-making brother, Jonathan, or whether Uncle Philip's fascination with the boy goes beyond the avuncular. Lavery and Gatward are at their best when they absorb the lesson of The Turn of the Screw: that it is the things that are unexplained that are truly frightening.
By and large, the show is also well performed. Hannah Watkins, apparently restricted by an accident to her back, brings just the right blend of Alice-like curiosity and innocence to the role of Melanie. And there is agile, expressive support from Vincenzo Nicoli whose Uncle Philip resembles a sinister, demonic Tommy Cooper, and from Penny Layden as his eagerly communicative though dumbstruck wife. The adaptation pre-empts any future reading of Carter's novel but, that said, it offers a theatrically lively mix of post-Freudian fairytale and south London gothic.
· Until February 9. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
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