As well as being regularly translated to film, television and radio, Charles Dickens’s gripping novel Great Expectations has long been a staple of the stage. As recently as May, the Oxford Playhouse hosted English Touring Theatre’s version, with the action transferred to the Indian sub-continent. This made for a complex and confusing evening of theatre, the memory of which is happily effaced by the lucid new production at the Watermill Theatre, in Bagnor, near Newbury.

This is an admirable piece of work whose success owes much to the skill of the adapter Neil Bartlett. His taut script neatly condenses the broad sweep of the story, dividing the narrative voice between the eight members of the cast, sometimes in a choric mode that serves to heighten the dramatic impact. Tom Mills supplies sound and recorded music to supplement aural effects produced by the actors themselves, including the percussive cacophony that begins the drama.

From this emerges clearly the rasp of a file on metal and the clang of hammer on anvil. The first connects with the terrifying encounter on the Kent marshes between young Pip (the excellent Edward Hancock) and the convict Magwitch (Stephen Finegold) who requires, besides ‘wittles’, the means to remove a shackle from his leg; the second suggests the smithy of Joe Gargery (Russell Layton), good-natured brother-in-law to Pip, from where both food and file are soon to be stolen. Kindly Joe deflects suspicion for the crime away from our hero, thereby sparing him from the attentions of his shrewish sister Mrs Joe (Emma Beattie) and her oft-used cane called ‘Tickler’.

Soon after, he begins a path towards greater fortune when he is introduced, through the agency of the pompous Mr Pumblechook (Jed Aukin), into the home of heiress Miss Havisham (Kazia Pelka). Jilted on the morning of her intended marriage, she now sits amid the ruin of her wedding breakfast plotting her revenge on men. In this, her beautiful but icy-hearted adopted daughter Estella (Mabel Jones) is designed to play a key role. Pip, of course, is smitten, his besottedness only increasing when he is transplanted into the life of a London swell by an unknown benefactor and he is able to mix more easily on her social level.

The comic touches that brighten the story are not forgotten by Mr Bartlett and director Paul Hart. These include the tips on etiquette supplied by Pip’s more socially assured London pal Herbert Pocket (Thomas Padden). For once, though, we are not given the happy ending Dickens provided in a last-minute revision suggested by his friend E. Bulwer-Lytton (his sole contribution to English literature, one wag called it). But this makes it true to the original conception.

Continues until November 5. Tickets: www.watermill.org.uk or 01635 46044.