"THE WIND WAS A TORRENT of darkness among the gusty trees; the moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas."  Are there any lines in the English language more evocative than the opening of Alfred Noyes' The Highwayman?  I learned them, it feels, on my mother's knee - so I could hardly wait to see this new multimedia production, based on the poem, acted out in the equally atmospheric setting of C Cubed's Temple.

In an interesting twist, the story's told by Tim the ostler, who narrates the play as well as playing his own role.  In Noyes' original, Tim's a crazed pantomime baddie with eyes "like hollows of madness"; his only action in his one-verse appearance is to betray the heroic Highwayman and the inn-keeper's daughter, Bess.  The play's defter portrayal explores Tim's motivations more - and early on, I found myself seriously questioning whether the Highwayman was truly worthy of my sympathy.  He's dashing, yes, but with his French cocked hat and stolen lace, isn't he merely a villainous rogue?

Sadly, though, a strong start isn't backed up by the rest of the play, which lacks the urgency and drama of Noyes' original lines.  In the poem, the highwayman comes riding, riding, up to the old inn door; in the play, he saunters in from stage left.  And when the King's soldiers arrive, in what could be a shockingly brutal scene, they hang around in the bar-room before slowly getting on with their sickening deed.

The multimedia content's a couple of short abstract video interludes, which I could frankly take or leave, but what surprised me most was the extent to which playwright Bahar Brunton has messed with the words of the poem.  He had to do something, of course - the original's nowhere near long enough to sustain a play - but I was expecting to find the original preserved as a narration, and new dialogue woven around.  In fact, Brunton's script places Noyes' words in the mouths of the characters, changing them at times and taking the early verses out of order.  It's a curiously jarring feeling when the play fails to open with those famous first lines.

In the added dialogue, there are a few moments of inspiration worthy of the original, but also some awful clangers: the doggerel rhyme of "riding" with "hiding" made me physically flinch.  And the additions spoil the driving, desperate rhythm, so much a feature of the original work.  It's telling that the most electrifying and harrowing part of the performance comes when Tim - in his role as narrator - simply recites the last half-dozen verses, as we watch them enacted on the stage.

It's great to see Noyes' poem get the attention it deserves, and there was some fine acting in this adaptation, particularly in the portrayals of Bess and Tim.  But sadly, as I left the Temple, my overriding feeling was that - while I enjoyed spending time with The Highwayman - I might have been better to do it simply by reading the poem again.