How do you condense 400 pages of Emily Brontë’s passionate prose into a play that doesn’t end up bouncing between brooding and histrionics?

April De Angelis’s new adaptation does a good job of cramming in all the key scenes and fragments of dialogue from the 1847 original. But you want more than a good precis from a trip to the theatre, and Indhu Rubasingham’s professional but impersonal production doesn’t have anything to add to its source material.

That lack of an angle encourages some rather roughhewn performances. Well, nobody acts badly, exactly – but then nor does anyone really connect with anyone else.

That’s fine for Simon Coates’s Lockwood, the self-admiring London booby through whose eyes we see the story, or for Toby Dantzic as a Tony Blair-voiced Linton, the prig who tries to shut out Heathcliff from Cathy’s life once they are married. But it’s bad news indeed for Amanda Ryan, who is impressive as the young Catherine (Linton’s daughter) but whose headstrong Cathy lacks the same easy touch.

She shuns marriage with the lowly love of her life, Heathcliff, even though “he’s more myself than I am”. Yet whatever conflagration of actorly atoms is required to make you buy into such a passion, it’s not visible between her and Antony Byrne’s rude and nasty Heathcliff.

Without that, they both end up looking like drama queens, she histrionic, he brooding like some, well, like some would-be Heathcliff.

As Nelly, Susannah York does well with her character’s mix of defiance and economic dependence. But, hovering around scenes as she recalls events to Lockwood, she reacts just a fraction of a second too keenly to events – as if she’s taking her bearings from the script in her head, rather than from what’s happening on stage.

So the story is told, and a murky mood is created, but it’s hard to believe that these characters have a life offstage. There’s one moment, early on, where it looks as if the actors are going to have some fun.

Lockwood is chuntering away, there’s an incongruous, isolated fall of snow, then he adds: “And it’s snowing.”

Hooray, you think: it’s funny. But more than that, it’s “theatre”. For, however much an adaptation condenses, it also needs to add something to replace all those lovely lost words.

That glimmer of playfulness gone, Rubasingham’s production does nothing vastly wrong and nothing vastly right. But for a tale billed as “passionate and spellbinding”, it’s serving short measures.

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