Adaptations of classic novels are bad enough. Add music, as in this version of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and you get double distortion. It becomes less a study of the heroine as a victim of Aeschylean fate than a triumphalist romance in which Tess dies still passionate for Angel Clare.

Most of the things that make Hardy's novel fascinating get sugared over in Karen Louise Hebden's adaptation and production; in particular the ever-present sense of nature and of Tess as a trapped animal. The story now starts with Tess's arrival at Talbothay's dairy and her love for Angel. Her teenage seduction by Alec D'Urberville is hinted at, but only fully explained at the end of the first half. She seems more a Mills & Boon heroine than a figure marked out by the gods for destruction.

Stephen Edwards's score, although musically literate in its glancing references to Sondheim and Philip Glass, at times lapses into wraparound accompaniment; close on three hours of aural wallpaper. And Justin Fleming's lyrics largely go in one ear and out the other.

A plodding first half yields to a more energetically dramatic second, and Poppy Tierney's Tess has good looks and a strong voice. Alasdair Harvey's Alec, smoulderingly evil in brown riding boots, unleashes his vocal power in a second-act trio. But Robert Irons cannot persuade you that Angel is much more than a cruel hypocrite, unworthy of the heroine.

But it seems typical of the show's sentimentality that Tess goes to her death not with the quiet stoicism of Hardy's original but with a simpering backward glance at Angel. A tough English tragedy has been turned into a rootless romance aimed, with hopeless over-optimism, at the international market.

• This review appeared in some editions of yesterday's paper