THERE have been musicals created from Dickens works before so it should not have been an entirely bad idea to give the same treatment to Great Expectations.

The story has all the ingredients of a successful musical – a likeable hero, a pretty female lead, unrequited love and a range of characters that are easily transposed from the written word to the theatre.

Unfortunately, however, the musical numbers in this production were not powerful enough to add anything to the plot and often distracted from the emotion being played out on stage.

You were left wondering if the play might have been a more commanding experience had it simply stuck to prose.

But there was a nice set, with moody clouds and sombre candlelight reflecting the story’s dark undertones, and the acting was good as long as you could get past Pip’s twin accents – neither of which was entirely convincing.

Steffan Rhodri, known for his role of Dave Coaches in sitcom Gavin & Stacey, made an affable Joe Gargery, and Simon Watts was amusing as Herbert, the boy who challenges Pip to a fist fight and later becomes his best friend.

It’s a challenge to cut such a sophisticated novel down for the stage and Tim Baker succeeds in choosing the defining scenes, but the emphasis on driving the plot forward means that the characters’ motives are never fully explored.

To truly understand the compulsion behind the double social experiment at the centre of the story – a blacksmith’s apprentice being turned into a gentleman and a young girl taught to devastate men’s feelings, you have to have read the book.

And thanks to half hearted pyrotechnics, a sudden explosion in Miss Havisham’s skirts would seem, to those who did not already know the ending, that she was the victim of spontaneous combustion.

LAURA DAVIS