Showtime

What: The Woman In White

Who: Theatre Aquarius

Where: Dofasco Centre for the Arts

When: To Oct. 4

Tickets: 905-522-7529

If triumphant staging, painterly lighting and an evocative set could save Beverley Cooper's expository drama The Woman In White, Theatre Aquarius would have an unqualified hit on its hands.

As it stands, Cooper's adaptation of Wilkie Collins' dark Victorian novel has the whiff of second-rate perfume about it.

There's too much talk and too little action. At times you feel you're watching a novel struggling mightily to become a play.

Too frequently characters step downstage to tell us what's happening when we long to see for ourselves.

We are in an audience in Limmeridge, England, asked to judge peculiar events surrounding a mysterious spectre in white. Is she what she seems, or something surprisingly more?

You won't find out here. The consequences of evil and betrayal are ultimately between you and the play.

What I will say is Cooper's play is a half-hour too long. Before it's over, it wears itself out.

It depends for its energy on Gina Wilkinson's magical staging, though even she can't survive its protracted denouement.

Unleashing creative powers, she has tried to unshackle the play from its stolid perspective.

Abetted by Lorenzo Savoini's minimalist setting, she has created a world of inner spirit. Across a plain of imagination, she unfolds this story in fluid, muscular staging.

A raked platform, splotched with William Morris-inspired wallpaper, stretches toward a blue swatch of sky. A single door stands in lonely relief, a metaphor for secrets shut away.

By sheer dint of imagination, Wilkinson opens such doors, supplying drama where there is mainly talk. Her elegant stage images linger in the imagination like faded daguerreotypes.

Much about her production suggests Chichester Festival Theatre's Nicholas Nickleby.

With the same insistence on ebb and flow, Wilkinson urges Cooper's recalcitrant play to life.

Even her visual enticements can't stop The Woman in White's downhill tumble into clumsy narration.

Still, an intriguing central thread tugs us to the very last line of Cooper's text. It has something to do with the way she has placed focus on an emerging modern woman, bursting free of male domination in a cruel world of Victorian suppression.

This is something Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Zippel and Charlotte Jones captured too in their version of this same story for London's West End in 2004.

In many ways, this musical treatment caught the undertow of Collins' story better than Cooper's expository adaptation.

Fortunately, a competent cast works hard to keep The Woman In White ticking along.

Michelle Giroux makes a handsome Marian Halcombe. Think Margaret Lockwood, Katharine Hepburn and Maggie Smith rolled into one.

Giroux's classical training is obvious, with cut-glass diction and glorious flights of operatic acting that hold this production together.

Richard McMillan's wicked Count Fosco is perfect, all corpulent lechery. Brendan Murray and Maggie Huculak add dramatic zest as flip sides of good and evil. And if John Blackwood and Oliver Becker chew the scenery a little too ripely, perhaps excess is necessary in a tale of sweep and passion.

Costumes vary from attractive to peculiar. Surely we aren't meant to see petticoats dangling four inches below an ill-fitting gown. And why a lavender dress peeks out from underneath Marian Halcombe's weeds of mourning is a puzzlement.

Gary Smith has written on theatre and dance for The Hamilton Spectator for more than 25 years.