Wait Until Dark, Garrick Theatre, London

Those hits of the Sixties just keep coming back. But for every Revolver or Blonde on Blonde, there were scores of records, much loved at the time, that now have the feel of irredeemable period pieces.

The same goes for plays. In this, Frederick Knott's revived 1966 thriller, a photographer obliviously smuggles a doll stuffed full of heroin into London from Amsterdam. Three crooks hatch an elaborate confidence trick to get the drugs back, terrorising the photo- grapher's recently blinded wife in the process.

The decision to set the play in the period is a shrewd one. Updated to today, it would seem even more of its time - and that's before having to resolve those pesky communication technology issues that scupper the isolation thriller.

In truth, the piece was dated the first time round. The Times reviewer of the day described Knott as "one of the last survivors" of the genre. Even the 1967 film directed by Terence Young (with Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin) had the look and feel of a movie from a decade earlier.

Anachronisms aside, this revival never truly exploits the play's central theme of a fear rooted deep in us all: fear of the dark. The director Joe Harmston handles the tense blackout scenes well, but like the writing itself, it is a triumph of craft over chills. The several "Ooh!" moments in the piece, where the audience truly did gasp, all spring from this craft. And the great pleasure of the evening lies in smugly trying to spot the "cheats" in Knott's plotting. There are none to find.

Peter Bowles dates the production, too, in his role as Roat, the mastermind behind the con trick. He comes across as seedy and jaded rather than dangerous and desperate to get his hands on a package of class A drugs worth £20,000. ("That's a lorra 'orse," opines Tony Scannell, who is spot on as a tawdry welfare-state hoodlum, of the aforementioned 'eroin.)

Towards the end of the play, especially, Bowles is a little too Hammer House of Horror, where the period's more casual sadism of, say, Bond, or even Joe Orton's Sloane would have been more chilling.

Saskia Wickham as the blind Susy is nicely measured in a taxing part which, in the wrong hands, could start at hysteria and build from there to coronary. Her journey is almost entirely plot-serving, but she carries off everything required of her with some aplomb.

The play'sº designer, Paul Farnsworth, has a field day with the period details. Gary Mavers's strong Scouse gangster Mike (perhaps his musical career had faded with the passing of Merseybeat and he'd turned to a life of crime?), in a keen observation, is turned out as a wannabe cool customer trying to ape the iconic Connery in Goldfinger.

Once, this script would have sailed effortlessly out from under the proscenium and into the blood to drop the temperature. Now it seems silly and contrived. Sadly, not even the fine period detail can save it from being a little more pratfall than nightfall.

To 28 Feb 2004 (0870 890 1104)