Great Expectations, Old Vic, Bristol, ***

If you're going to turn a 600-page novel into a digestible two-hour play, then something's got to go; and indeed, in David Farr's adaptation of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, a lot has gone. He has honed the Victorian's work into a simple, quick-paced narrative that replaces Dickensian verbosity with psychodrama.

A sprawl of characters are dumped – including the charming Herbert, leaving Pip as a truly lonesome figure throughout the story – and others such as Compeyson are reduced to mere ciphers. Farr narrows it all down to one focus: the subjectivity of the central character, presenting twisted people and twisted fates through the distorting lens of Pip's personality. This strips Dickens of his familiar tone, and recasts him in the style of a mid-20th-century European writer.

This "continental" feel is reflected in director Gordon Anderson's staging. While Farr has managed to make Dickens feel more like Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Anderson offers a highly stylised conception that has its roots firmly outside the English theatrical tradition. When inspiration strikes, Ander-son's vision is exceptional.

One of the most striking images is of a Christmas dinner table rearing almost vertically from the stage, the adults in preposterously outsized hats towering over the young Pip (Aidan McArdle) at the bottom. It is as though John Tenniel's "Mad Hatter's Tea Party" has been remixed by Kafka to haunt the mind of a terrified child.

Miss Haversham – a spellbinding performance by Jenny Quayle – scuttles around her bewebbed mansion like a great white spider, spinning plots and pulling the threads of her puppets. Unfortunately, Anderson and the show's designer Dick Bird seem to have found too few imagination-sparking moments in Farr's script. As a result, a great deal of the play takes place on aching expanses of bare stage with little more than lighting effects and smoke to set the scene.

None the less, the theatrical ambition of this production is a million miles away from the staid provinciality of the unadventurous Liaisons Dangereuses, which launched the new artistic directors' first season. Having set their sights – in a manifesto published in The Independent – on emulating the raison d'être of the regional state theatres found on the Continent, the Old Vic's new regime can take satisfaction from the fact that this production is more Mittel- Europa than Middle England.

If the company's debut production Liaisons Dangereuses was the blip and Great Expectations is the future, then – for the first time in years – a night at the theatre in Bristol is suddenly going to become an exciting prospect.

To 3 May 0117-987 7877