STAGE REVIEW: Wait Until Dark, at the Festival Theatre, Malvern, from Tuesday, October 24, to Saturday, October 28, 2017.

WELL, the waiting is now over but this particular wait wasn’t totally worth it as many who have seen this touring revival must feel they have been left in the dark.

Granted the script is sinister enough on occasions to warrant spells of audience anxiety, also it has plenty of twists and turns, but all the time, in spite of several fine performances including the exceptional efforts of actress Karina Jones, it lacked a certain credibility.

Basically the story centres around a child’s doll, stuffed full of heroin, which the photographer husband of Susy, a blind woman, has bizarrely been persuaded to bring back with him after an assignment in Europe.

Cue for criminals to collect - but no one knows what has happened to the doll apart from Gloria, the daughter of the woman who owns Susy and Sam’s flat in Notting Hill Gate.

Why does it always seem to be Notting Hill? Why not a suburb of Leeds, Leicester or even Leominster?

There a moments, possibly by Alastair Whatley’s direction - surely it wasn’t by design, when the cast of this Original Theatre Company production circumvents reality.

Not your expected hard-core villains!

If you’ve got a gang of desperate criminals seeking a valuable stash of drugs they surely wouldn’t waste time on the niceties of guile and pretence. They would be in there searching every nook and cranny, with not a care about breakages, and surely threatening violence to ensure they got what they wanted!

Too often what was going on visually and spoken seemed implausible and sparked the mind into wondering, at times, why.

On balance it must be remembered it was 50 years ago when author Frederick Knott’s follow up to his thrilling Dial M for Murder, made its way from the stage to the big screen with Audrey Hepburn earning an Oscar Award nomination for the role of Susy.

Life has changed so much since then…

Karina Jones might also earn herself a stage award nomination. Registered blind at the age of 13 she was impressive as she gave the necessary edginess to the play while at the same time splendidly working her way around the obstacle course of a cluttered living room as well as showing remarkable agility and confidence in coping with a steep and narrow staircase.

She ensures we are feeling for her and what her fate might be as she cleverly pieces together the auditory clues she might be able to use to outwit the gang, along with the assistance of the gangly and gung-ho Gloria, so energetically and warmly played by Shannon Rewcroft.

The experienced Jack Ellis also caught the eye as Mike, the villain with a heart, and Tim Treloar, who flitted in between a nasty piece of work and an inadvertent comedy character, was - more often than not - suitably sinister and psychologically disturbed.

The climax comes in a sustained ‘black-out’, with the audience advised of this at the outset.

Yes, we were still left in the dark.

It’s all over in the relatively short time of just over two hours, including the interval, but it still felt like a steady plod instead of a fast-moving chiller covering a 24-hour period.