It was only a few years ago that the last attempt to adapt Truman Capote’s 1958 novella for the stage (and pretend in vain that the real draw wasn’t the recollection of Audrey Hepburn in the sanitised 1961 movie version) opened in this very theatre. Richard Greenberg’s present adaptation (which ran on Broadway in 2013) is more coherent than Samuel Adamson’s 2009 version in terms both of narrative and overall tone, although it isn’t always easy to spot this beneath Nikolai Foster’s staging. It’s true that the performance I saw was the final West End preview, but the show has been touring for nearly five months now, so I hardly think that running-in provides much of an excuse.

Foster’s long suit as a director is musicals, and he has rather approached this piece as if it were one. In fact, it contains four numbers including “People Will Say We’re In Love” and two renditions of “Moon River”, including one which serves as a prologue just so we feel we’re getting our money’s worth of nostalgia.

The wacky flibbertigibbet Holly Golightly is here cast to conform to Capote’s original image of her, with longish blonde hair (he wanted Monroe for the film). Singer Pixie Lott, who takes the role for its two-month mid-tour West End run, seems to think energy is all that’s needed to pull off a decent characterisation. She delivers every line in a vampish sing-song that reduces her character to the two dimensions of a 1960s American TV sitcom and makes her supposed universal attractiveness incomprehensible.

Lott’s performance is more extreme than her fellows’, but Foster’s approach is consistent: everything is a caricature. Alas, this is what neither Capote nor Greenberg wrote. This adaptation makes the homosexuality of the nameless narrator explicit, so that he begins as another seeming suitor of Holly but develops into her GBF; however, Matt Barber plays him with all the camp of Capote but little of the mordancy. The show’s sumptuous programme does not even include a cast list... you know, the one essential element in any programme... as if assuming that the spectacle and the memories ought to be enough for us. They are not.

Written for the Financial Times.