Bryony Lavery’s play Frozen is currently enjoying a revival at the Haymarket in London’s West End, but she is at least as well known for her adaptations. The latest of these – a version of Graham Greene’s 1938 novel of love and crime, right and wrong – is on tour through May in a production by York-based Pilot Theatre Company and that city’s Theatre Royal, but it seemed only fitting to visit it in situ, as it were. Designer Sara Perks’ gantries and galleries are far more potently suggestive of Brighton’s Palace Pier when on stage less than a quarter of mile from the real thing.

Lavery’s long and diligent experience means that she can simultaneously be faithful to Greene’s thematic preoccupations and yet also work some smart rebalancing. As small-time teenage gangster Pinkie Brown tries to cover up a murder by resorting to increasingly desperate and extreme measures, not least seducing and marrying innocent young waitress Rose whose testimony could hang him, Greene imbues each of this couple with a version of his own Roman Catholicism. Consequently, they embody dimensions of theology and of morality, which are shown to be sometimes radically different yet each informing the other. Lavery sets a further plate spinning by emphasising the role of Ida, who on the basis of a brief meeting with Pinkie’s victim feels an obligation to him and becomes determined, on the basis of her personal moral code rather than any formal doctrine, to solve a matter which the police have already written off.

Gloria Onitiri’s Ida takes the acting laurels, perhaps because she can make the character more fully her own rather than either Greene’s or his God’s. Sarah Middleton is an open and engaging Rose, and Jacob James Beswick’s Pinkie keeps himself to himself a little too much. Hannah Peel’s score alternates industrial keyboard buzzes with Pianet-and-Leslie-cabinet twinkling, each of which adds an otherworldliness to the proceedings. This is all about intangibles: at the climax, the gun which Pinkie offers for a fraudulent suicide pact is real but unused, the knife he wields to do his ultimate work is imaginary in Beswick’s clasped hand. Esther Richardson’s production, though solid, aims more at the head than the heart.

Written for the Financial Times.