Grand Canal Theatre

AT A certain point in Marcy Kahan’s adaptation of this enormously successful romcom, one of the characters gives the game away. While browsing through a Manhattan bookstore, high-maintenance Sally (Sarah Jayne Dunn) has yet another chance encounter with a loose acquaintance and low-maintainer called Harry (Rupert Hill), and her friend Marie recognises it as something more convenient than fate. “This is just like in the movies,” she says. What ever gave her that idea?

Nora Epron’s 1989 screenplay seems like an easy fit for the stage. It can be shrunk down to just four main characters; it’s more reliant on comic dialogue than lavish spectacle; and its romantic philosophy, gender-difference arguments and zesty one-liners are so reassuringly familiar that the producers could leave them with the box office as collateral. But watching this passable, economical touring version in the gargantuan Grand Canal Theatre, you get the sense of a production and an audience that can’t leave the film behind.

In one of few neat alterations we begin, not with the film’s long-haul car ride, but with Harry painting Sally’s new apartment, establishing the ying and yang of their personalities – Hill a libidinously morose Harry; Dunn a tottering, fussy and prim Sally – and setting out the story’s much debated premise: men and women can’t be friends “because the sex part always gets in the way”. But while the timeframe is different – the 1990s, for some reason – a series of brief, fade-out sequences are unmistakably borrowed from film narrative.

Continuing at an episodic clip, director Michael Gyngell’s crisp production seems to gets too close to the movie for comfort, a capitulation to its inbuilt audience who expect the strict repetition and recital of a religious ceremony. There is even anticipatory applause for the restaurant scene, the near climax of the evening, where Dunn doesn’t so much prove that all women can fake an orgasm, but that all women can fake Meg Ryan faking an orgasm.

Similar emulations suggest a failure of theatrical imagination – the “How we met” sequences of the movie are dutifully inherited as lifeless audio snippets, while an egregious “flashback” montage of dialogue is hoisted directly from the film’s last reel. Though there are pleasures to be had here, such aping never allows us to forget that they come second-hand.

That restaurant scene says it all; a slavish act of imitation with dim hopes of achieving the same effect. We’ll have what she’s having.

Runs until July 3rd