First things first: there’s no balloon. Everyone remembers the red-and-white hot-air balloon in the 1956 film version starring David Niven, but it’s not in Jules Verne’s original book, so it’s not in Laura Eason’s stage adaptation; indeed, Eason goes so far as to have her protagonist Phileas Fogg point this out to us.

She and director Lucy Bailey go for the whimsical and slightly silly in their version of the tale about the phlegmatic Fogg and his wager to cross the globe in the specified time simply to prove a point. Disembodied hands pass objects up through trapdoors, a length of duct tubing becomes the trunk of an otherwise unseen elephant, and Fogg plays a hand of his beloved whist with actors offstage by producing their cards via sleight-of-hand. Robert Portal is, if anything, more of an adventurer than Fogg himself, having rowed across the Atlantic and run through the Sahara. No wonder his traveller is so unflappable.

This is the production’s greatest flaw, however. Fogg is the omnicompetent Englishman in an age when one could travel around the planet and every inch of land one trod would be coloured British pink in the atlas (although Fogg’s route takes him through the U.S.A. – well, formerly pink). No delay causes him to turn a hair: he simply hires an elephant, or buys a Chinese junk, or goes off on a raid to liberate his French valet Passepartout from American Indians. No problem. The problem with “no problem” is that we never feel enough is at stake for Fogg, even when he appears to lose the wager and face ruin. Simon Gregor’s Passepartout gets both animated and agitated, but not enough for two; as police inspector Fix, mistakenly pursuing Fogg on a bank robbery charge, Tony Gardner too could usefully offer more than scowling stolidity.

The template for this style of production would seem to be the four-person version of The 39 Steps which recently closed after nine years in the West End. But eight actors don’t look as daft as four. Not quite a case of “less is more”: the pedant in me insists on fewer are more.

Written for the Financial Times.