Breakfast At Tiffany's, Theatre Royal, Haymarket

You might imagine a cultural artefact on the topic of make overs, albeit primarily of the self, to be handled with particular care and attention when it is itself made over, as the Truman Capote novella Breakfast at Tiffany's has now been on the West End. Alas, Sean Mathias's second successive Haymarket production is an object lesson in how not to tamper with the pre-existing goods. Joseph Cross's leading man, William Parsons, sends us into the interval, his jaw dropped open in disbelief. He's not the only one.

The misfire is all the more surprising given the abilities of those involved, starting with Mathias, a director who knows a thing or two about style as his deliciously ripe National Theatre production of Les Parents Terribles (seen on Broadway as Indiscretions) so indelibly proved. His current leading lady, Anna Friel, inheriting Audrey Hepburn's screen role as the ever-elusive, alluring Holly  Golightly, played a variant on this role in the Broadway transfer of Closer : a siren whose capacity for self-invention is at once her calling card and her undoing. That, as they say, was then and this is now.

Indeed, it's been some time either side of the Atlantic since I've seen a story set in New York that so totally fails to capture the particular buzz of a city that has always drawn comers from all walks of life eager to shed their skin and start anew. Anthony Ward's set gives us a pair of fire escapes that on occasion creak uneasily together, eclipsing the blandly shifting citiscape on view at the rear of the stage: an occasional mini-chandelier is the set's only concession to the glamour inherent in the title of the piece. But any sense of a Manhattan alive to self-discovery and adventure vanishes almost from the start, in favour of a fractured narrative reaping diminishing returns and populated by OTT supporting players (poor James Dreyfus runs around deriding Chekhov, of all unlikely targets, and generally swearing a lot) and a colourless central pair.

As was true earlier in September of the West End premiere of The Shawshank Redemption, Breakfast At Tiffany's makes much of drawing for inspiration from its literary source while simultaneously trading on audience affection for the better-known Blake Edwards film. (So what if Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play the defining female role? For a generation or two of movie buffs, Audrey Hepburn and Holly are as one.)

But adaptor Samuel Adamson's deliberately splintered approach to the material on stage serves less to recharge a time-honoured tale than render bitty and piecemeal the shifting affections between the mercurial Holly and her adoring neighbour, William, the short story writer and self-evident Capote surrogate here envisaged as an Alabama boy of closely guarded sexuality. This latest adaptation gives both the principals a nude scene - one in each act - but I somehow doubt that Cross will emerge from this onstage bathtub an overnight sensation the way that Jude Law did when he took Indiscretions to New York.

This is a fable driven by force of personality and needs precisely that from its two leads. (Paging Cate Blanchett and Neil Patrick Harris!) Instead, we get Friel working furiously to inhabit the "it" girl of Holly's own devising on the Upper East Side ca. 1943, the actress accompanying herself on guitar to one of the prettier songs from Oklahoma! in between an impromptu fashion parade indicating where the play's design budget must have ended up. What's absent is that compelling mixture of minx and enigma that might attract us to the same Holly so hellbent on seducing le tout New York.

Friel, to be fair, needs far more to play against than a relative stage neophyte in Running With Scissors discovery Cross, a New Jersey boy whose southern accent sounds every bit as applied as it might have done had the role been played by an Englishman: a rare case of the real deal - an American brought to London to play an American - in this instance seeming false.

Or perhaps that's as it should be in a play that makes much of being a real phony as opposed to having to fake one's fakery, as it were: a parable of authenticity enacted by a platonic duo who on some level are on the run from themselves. After all, as Holly puts it, "home is where you feel at home," so why shouldn't she bring New York to its knees? If this Breakfast At Tiffany's is to have any hope of achieving that same goal itself, I suggest all involved reconvene to take a fresh look at the venture over a very long lunch.

Performances until 9 January 2010. Book online here