Nicholas Nickleby

Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire: Offacially, this adaptation of Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby is set in the 1950s in order to break the spell of Victoriana and release the spirit of the story.

The adapter, Jonathan Holloway, who also directs the production for the English touring company Red Shift, quite reasonably suggests a parallel between the post-war decline of deference and the rise of idealism in Victorian England.

Certainly, the notion of Nicholas as an Angry Young Man is potentially intriguing.

Unofficially, however, there is another obvious reason for this innovation: the need to avoid the shadow of Trevor Nunn and John Caird's famous 1981 staging of David Edgar's adaptation of the same novel.

As it happens, though, there was never much danger of anybody making invidious comparisons. This version simply isn't in the same league. Nor does Red Shift come within a million miles of Shared Experience, the English company that has done most to make the staging of novels a respectable art form, And as it happens, the device of transferring Nicholas Nickleby to the 1950s does more harm than good, blowing Holloway's one really good idea.

To his credit, Holloway has spotted an opportunity to make a connection between the novel and the stage.

Dickens was writing at a time when "the play of the book" was in demand from a semi-literate audience that had neither the time nor the skills to read.

The hero Nicholas, moreover, actually wanders into this world, when he and Smike get jobs with the hack actor-manager Vincent Crummles.

The one part of the show that is genuinely arresting is when Holloway allows Crummles's show to blend into the wider story. Neil Irish's strikingly intelligent designs, based around the use of theatrical dressing-room mirrors, picks up on this idea to intriguing effect. But the implication - that the whole thing should be played as a Victorian melodrama - is completely missed because it doesn't square with the 1950s setting.

The feeling, then, is that one of the great directorial sins has been committed, with Holloway sticking to a preconceived device - let's set the whole thing in the 1950s - even when it stymies the interesting possibilities that have emerged in rehearsal.

The consequences of this mistake become ever more severe as the show drags on. The original novel is notoriously baggy, and the plot devices that Dickens has to resort to become increasingly outrageous as he tries to resolve the story. Within the hammy conventions of Victorian melodrama, such devices as the unbelievably benevolent Cheeryble twins, the sudden emergence of the convict Brooker and the convenient death of Nicholas's putative father-in-law Bray have a certain absurd energy.

Outside those conventions, in the 1950s setting, the absurdity is merely tedious.

It doesn't help either that the hard-working ensemble cast lacks the subtlety to exploit Dickens's genius for creating characters who are simultaneously terrifying, grotesque and very funny. When the actress playing the deliciously awful Fanny Squeers is reduced to fumbling with Nicholas Nickleby's fly in search of a laugh, you know that they know that something's not right.

Runs until Saturday.

To book: 01-2312929