The Wasp Factory

Watching a stage production of The Wasp Factory is necessarily a very different experience to reading the novel.

Seeing rather than imagining fundamentally changes how the story unfolds, and Ed Robson's production of Malcolm Sutherland's adaptation doesn't quite know how to handle the twist in this tale, or keep the audience gripped and emotionally invested until it is revealed.

To be fair, creating sympathy for a lead character who's a serial killer isn't easy, particularly when the disturbed individual in question doesn't quite seem to know who he is.

On one hand, 16-year-old Frank is rigidly set in his very strange ways ' isolated on an unnamed Scottish island, his life is ruled by bizarre rituals of his own establishment, and he considers his personality to be dictated by past misdeeds that may be imagined.

On the other hand, as portrayed by Nicola Jo Cully, Frank is a confused young man who, in the absence of anything resembling a positive role model, is struggling to become comfortable in his own skin and with the sound of his voice. His behaviour is convincingly child-like ' noisy, repetitive, unsophisticated ' and there's little light and shade until the play's closing moments.

Robson is both director and designer here, and he has a tendency to allow visual spectacle to take priority over exploration of characters and themes. Banks's macabre tale is fantastical and allegorical, so a naturalistic telling wouldn't work, but musical interludes and bursts of nudity serve to distract from the brain-bending questions being posed about religion, identity and madness.