UNLESS was the Booker-shortlisted closing chapter of the writing career of Canadian novelist Carol Shields.

At the invitation of artistic director Sir Alan Ayckbourn, after she visited the Stephen Joseph Theatre, she did a dramatisation for the stage, working with her daughter, Sara Cassidy, while in the fatal throes of breast cancer.

"Unless is about loss, women, mothers and daughters and the humming engine of marriage," says Cassidy, in her programme notes.

It is a feminist piece of domestic frustration, heavy-handed in Timothy Sheader's intense, congealed production.

Like Shields, narrator Reta Winters (Maggie Cronin) is a writer and mother. In Reta's case, she pens light summer fiction, working from home north of Toronto, married to a faithful husband, Tom (Richard Derrington), who will always be home by ten past six. They have three daughters, two of whom (Clare McCarron, Sophie Duval) are lively, attractive and loving, but now they are the Winters of discontent, the family's happiness shattered by the vanishing act of the eldest daughter, university scholar Norah (Pip Ripley).

Symbolically, Neil Irish's ascetic set is not only bleached white to signify loss and the draining of colour from life (even the tulips change from red to white for the second half), but it has half-a-dozen closed doors too. More often in theatre this indicates farce, but not so here where characters emerge briskly for enervating vignettes of arch, deflating wit (Reta's coffee-drinking female friends or her book editor, Laurence Kennedy) or a door opens to reveal Norah cross-legged on a Toronto street corner, with a begging bowl and a placard saying "Goodness".

Solo words carry much weight in Unless: "Unless" itself is "the worry word of the English language", says Reta, who also calls it "the trapdoor of hope" in another image of doors. Against that back wall of doors is screened a series of conjunctions or prepositions, such as Whatever or Notwithstanding, to convey disconnection.

The problem with Unless on stage is not single words but their collective lack of fizz. Cronin is a flat, monotone narrator; the acting is insincere and affected; the drama dull. As one door shuts, another one closes.

Unless, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until May 7. Box office: 01723 370541.

Updated: 10:18 Tuesday, April 19, 2005