THE 1970 film version with Alan Bates and Julie Christie is indelibly stamped in the memory, Harold Pinter script and all.

Forty-one years later, The Go-Between takes on a new life as a musical drama with the book by David Wood, the doyen of children’s stage adaptations, music for piano and voices by Richard Taylor and lyrics by Wood and Taylor.

The new version has at its heart an adult version of Leo, the go-between, here called by his surname, Colston (James Staddon), the reserved narrator so haunted by his past as he sits with a trunk in his attic in 1950 and re-reads his diary from five decades earlier.

Uncomfortably revisiting the summer holiday he spent amid the gentry as the guest of the much more spiffing Marcus (John Cairns), he observes the boy, and indeed at times they address each other, as he relates LP Hartley’s wistful coming-of-age story of naivety and the end of innocence in the summer heat of rural Norfolk in 1900.

Michael Pavelka’s set captures the idyllic lustre yet strangeness of the socially divided world that Leo (Jake Abbott) enters at Brandham Hall. He places ever-present faded silver chairs on wooden floorboards with clusters of tufts of grass all around the stage and the grand piano legs.

A series of doorways are lifted off the floor and suspended at an angle, to emphasise the destabilising impact of the clandestine relationship of Marcus’s manipulative sister Marian (Sophie Bould) and rugged farm labourer Ted (Stuart Ward), conducted with the aid of Leo dispatching letters and messages from one to the other.

Tim Lutkin’s lighting gives Norfolk a nostalgic summer golden glow and Pavelka’s costumes are a delight too.

So, despite all the impressive accoutrements of Roger Haines’s production, why did The Go-Between not move this reviewer, contrary to so many reviews elsewhere? The Go-Between is an in-between, a “musical drama” that is almost an opera, not quite a Sondheim musical, with long stretches of sung narrative, rather than big musical numbers.

David Wood maintains this new adaptation is a play with a score, but the passages of spoken dialogue are far outnumbered by the singing, and you wish for more of them, especially given that Wood’s turn of phrase has more emotional impact in those spoken interludes.

What’s more, an ensemble scene involving Deadly Nightshade branches and umbrellas is balletic but elusive in its precise meaning.

Wood writes with customary prowess for the young boys, whose performances are a high point, but there is more heat in the Norfolk air than between Marian and Ted, their boundary-crossing passion being rationed to the shadows. Among the supporting roles, meanwhile, Stephen Carlile is outstanding as Viscount Trimingham, Marian’s upright but downright dull suitor.

This world premiere has plenty of good ingredients, not least Jonathan Gill’s piano playing, but it needs to be more of a play to be wholly satisfying.

Box office: 0113 213 7700.