The past is a different country; they do things differently there. It must be a few decades since this kind of vignette adaptation was the latest word in staging novels.

Nick Stafford’s literal trudge through the plot so much lacks dramatic rhythm as to seem at times like an extended film trailer.

Pastel shades are apt enough for a pastoral romance and Ray Lett’s hot summer garden sucks the eye into a dark central miasma matching the lovers’ secrecy. The stage is also populated by sliding screens behind which scenes are set up in semi-visibility and complete audibility, and from which a stage managerial posterior occasionally peeks.

It’s clever, cultural but also cumbersome. And this is the most anaemic production artistic director Michael Napier Brown can ever have produced. Cliches abound in this sub-Chatterley situation. Farmer Burgess is a hirsute arm-swinging toiler, aristocratic Hugh straight-backed and square-jawed. But performances never go beyond this level, while Marion is self-contained to the point of non-existence.

Stafford uses an old and young Leo so until the final section where the two intertwine Robert Vahey’s senior citizen Leo is left in a stage corner playing gooseberry to such action as there is.

Until February 25. Box office: 01604 32533. Running time 2 hrs.