WHEN Harry first met Sally in 1989, it sprinkled new glitter on the old–fashioned formula of a silver-screen romantic comedy with the winning New York combination of Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan before they both became irritating.

When Harry met Sally again, by now Nora Ephron’s wise and witty script had been adapted for its London stage premiere by Marcy Kahan, with the story’s 12-year span updated to conclude in 2000, complemented by some very incidental music by Ben Cullum and his more famous jazz brother Jamie.

Now Harry is meeting Sally again, still with Kahan’s script and the Cullum collaboration, for a UK tour featuring a six-piece cast led by soap graduates Rupert Hill (late of Coronation Street) and Sarah Jayne Dunn (Hollyoaks’ regulation blonde Mandy Richardson). Forgive the lack of further names but programmes were as absent as originality on Tuesday night.

Where Meg Ryan may have made a fake orgasm sound like the real thing in the movie’s celebrated restaurant scene, the stage show just feels fake, but it is not entirely anticlimactic, however, thanks predominantly to the wit that still resides in the barbed badinage and bickering of corporate lawyer Harry and journalist Sally, as Ephron’s story ponders whether there can ever be friendship between a man and a woman without sex.

Hill, with his boyish features and fashionable dust covering of a 21st century beard, looks a little modern and preppy for the role, but he has the cocksure Noo York demeanour and shrugged shoulders off to a tee, making Harry as easy to love as hate.

Dunn ain’t as cute or contrary as button-nosed Meg, and if the faux orgasm is the inevitable peak of her performance, she nevertheless hits it off well with Hill, their chemistry sufficiently believable, albeit without the firework sparks of the cinema original. Not only when they are pounding away on their static gym-bunny exercise bikes does it feel like they are going nowhere fast.

No attempt beyond costume is made to age their Harry and Sally over their 12 years of falling in and out of everything but bed, and while you could argue that reality can go take a hike in the land of romantic comedy, changing looks would add to the physical element of the piece.

The awkward set, lost in a big theatre, enhances the feeling that this show would work better in a more intimate studio setting, rather like another couple clash, Frankie & Johnny In The Clair De Lune. Too many scenes are crammed into a small space at the front, beneath raised platforms that fail to lift the action, when you need more than a cloth backdrop of the New York skyline to evoke the bustling rush of the Big Apple, and more than affection for Rob Reiner’s film to justify a stage transfer that adds nothing to the faded Eighties’ magic.

When Harry Met Sally, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday. Box office: 0844 847 2322.