Prepare to be a bit scared. The memory of Nicholas Roeg's film haunts Nell Leyshon's adaptation of Don't Look Now, directed by Lucy Bailey.

By comparison, the show is merely eerie when it might have been spine-chilling, but provides a ripping, portentous yarn that takes the time to look deep into the damaged souls of its characters.

It follows the original Daphne Du Maurier short story more closely than the film. So the child lost by the central couple, John and Laura, succumbed to meningitis rather than drowning, and rather than observe the death, we meet the husband and wife already on their recuperative trip to Venice.

There, an encounter with twin old ladies is the prelude to John seeing phantom girls in red macs. It's in between the suspense-packed, visionary sections that Leyshon gets to grips with the story.

She concentrates on John and Laura's grief - the distance that their child's death has placed between them.

Susie Trayling's Laura is a broken women desperately working at a mask of composure. As John, Simon Paisley Day - unlike Donald Sutherland on screen - is English, and exhibits all the well-heeled repression so important in Du Maurier.

When the action mimics the film with an extended love scene, the sense of emotional release brings meaning to the frottage absent from the celluloid, though more nipples and far fewer positions are covered.

But a thriller must be judged on its thrills. Here, Bailey has worked hard. The set furniture moves at all times, reminding us unknown forces are at play. Lights and rain machines get to work.

Still you can't help but feel the limitations of the stage. Chases through Venetian streets resemble farce as John runs out one exit to enter from another.

The old ladies are on-stage whenever John and Laura retire to their hotel room, a ham-fisted way of suggesting their uncanny influence. At least the murderous climax really makes the skin creep.

The whole remains decent stuff - even slightly original - but the DVD or book remain better options.

• Until March 31 (08700 500 511; www.lyric.co.uk).