After the deeply disturbing, grippingly theatrical potency of Anthony Neilson’s Relocated, any other play venturing into the same dark territory of kidnapping, abuse and imprisonment risks paling by comparison. Mark Healy’s adaptation of The Collector, John Fowles’s 1963 debut novel, directed by Ben Caplan, not only lacks intensity but seems reductive.

While Neilson’s play, with its shifting identities and shards of surreal action, acknowledged the incomprehensible at the core of the crimes of Fred West or Josef Fritzl, Healy’s feels strangely inconsequential. A warped power balance, obsession and sexual neurosis are all here; but there is scant sense of real complexity. The result is little more than a slightly prurient thriller.

Fowles’s book consists of four sections, chief of which are a pair of contrasting accounts of events from the viewpoint of captor — Frederick, a repressed working-class civil servant and avid butterfly collector — and Miranda, a pretty, well-to-do art student. Healy’s adaptation skimps on Miranda’s version, so we miss out on Fowles’s exploration of the way in which her confusion, hatred and fear collide with her moral convictions. There’s also little about Miranda’s bohemian London life, underpinned by a passionate belief in freedom that makes her incarceration in Frederick’s cellar a particularly cruel irony.

Mark Fleischmann is effective as Frederick, the play’s narrator, quietly reasonable, dangerously unhappy and unhinged, his banal arrangements for entertaining his “guest” a horrible contrast to the violence he commits against her. And though Healy gives her less to work with, Rosalind Drury is also persuasive as Miranda, wilful and intelligent.

Overall, though, both writing and staging are disappointingly pedestrian. The fragmentation of Fowles’s narrative could have accommodated dramatic innovation. Sadly, Healy settles for a straightforward linear approach. There’s canny use of video footage in the opening scene, in which the lens stalks Miranda around West End streets just as Frederick learnt every behavioural pattern of this most rare and prized of human butterflies. Yet the stagecraft can’t match the disquieting fascination of its prose source.

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