THIS is a strange night at the theatre, and not only because Frazer Hines - the former Emmerdale ladies' man Joe Sugden - is playing a knife-wielding baddie in a leather jacket.

Wait Until Dark will be best remembered for the 1967 film version, starring Audrey Hepburn. As a programme note and the pre-show, between-scene and interval pop soundtrack indicates, Chris Moreno's new touring version of Frederick Knott's suspense thriller is set in 1984, September 1984 to be precise.

Now unless there is a paranoid Orwellian or Thatcherite subtext to this drama that has so far eluded me, the reason for 1984 appears to be no reason at all. Maybe it is because 1984 is the exact halfway point between 1967 and 2001, and this revival wants to modernise the play without entering the age of the now ubiquitous mobile phone. If so, that desire is unnecessary; the Sixties would have sufficed, and the purple colour of Alan Miller Bunford's set design seems to agree, even if the pine doors and lighting are as Eighties as Kajagoogoo.

Anyway, to the play: a doll has been brought from Amsterdam to London by photographer Sam Henderson, who is unaware that it contains heroin. The doll has since disappeared from his flat, and three petty crooks have made it their murderous mission to find it. Those crooks, con artists all, are Hines's mean Croker, fellow Emmerdale escapee Kevin Pallister's slimy and slim Mike, and Tony Scannell's Roat, a malevolent if ham-filled role that finds Scannell, fondly remembered for his ten years as Ted Roach in The Bill, swapping from the good side of the law to the bad.

The photographer has made a snappy exit to an assignment in Brighton, leaving the flat in the hands of his wife, Susy (Chloe Newsome, alias Vicky McDonald in Coronation Street in a former soap life).

Susy is blind, and as a result her other senses are highly developed, making her both very suspicious of the motives and movements of the terrible trio and in turn a smart opponent to their scheme.

Mind you, she has practice aplenty in detecting odd behaviour. Her teenage tantrum of a bespectacled neighbour, Gloria (Emma Gannon) is liable to throw a wobbly at the mere mention of "four eyes". What a weird girl.

The pace is well judged throughout but there is an absence of claustrophobia and menace, more baffling loose ends than a badly-tied corset, and a lack of light relief - until the Hammer Horror ending - to rival the lack of light at the finale.

How fitting that this baffling mystery should end in darkness.