The things that scare us most are often those we cannot see, refuse to acknowledge or are unable to explain. It is exactly these submerged or intangible fears that Lucy Bailey’s elliptical and elegantly staged supernatural thriller attempts, with only partial success, to make dramatically palpable.

The production, which transfers from Sheffield to the Lyric Hammersmith, in London, this month, is based on Daphne du Maurier’s 1971 short story of the same name. In 1973 the director Nicolas Roeg brought it to the screen. His film has become a classic, celebrated for its mosaic-like depiction of the menacing atmosphere of a seductively rotting Italian city.

Du Maurier’s tale is grounded in grief. In the aftermath of their young daughter’s illness and subsequent death, a middle-class English couple return to their honeymoon haunt of Venice. Loss and guilt bind them together but, at the same time, reveal cracks in an essentially loving relationship that soon widen into fissures.

Nell Leyshon’s adaptation of the source story plays up conventional gender traits. Simon Paisley Day’s John is a typically masculine, stiff-upperlip empiricist. Underlying feelings about having failed to save his child’s life render him only partially sensitive to his wife’s needs. Susie Trayling’s Laura puts up a good front, but mourning has made her both internally morose and highly strung. The actors are fairly adept at capturing the flickering mix of familiar affection and suppressed tension between characters who, on some deeper, unarticulated level, perhaps blame each other for what has happened.

But it is what is about to happen that counts. John and Laura meet a pair of older English sisters, one of whom claims to be psychic. The casting here is spot on. Joanna McCallum and Susan Wooldridge are perfect as grey-haired, grey-suited matrons in sensible shoes. The psychic one (Wooldridge) is both emotionally fragile and, more significantly, blind. Instinctively she recognises John’s nascent gift for second sight, a gift that he emphatically denies. Meanwhile, in du Maurier’s pulpiest plot device, tourists are being found in the canals with their throats cut.

The entire premise is intriguing, especially in its dalliance with a wider philosophical theme of how human beings often come a cropper trying to make sense of a highly ambiguous world. Rather than compete with the film — how could they? — Bailey and her design team rely on restraint and streamlined suggestion. The coppery walls of Mike Britton’s set reflect the ripples of a discreet downstage pool. Fog curls above the stage, handsomely caught by Chris Davey’s moody lighting. J. Peter Schwalm’s and Nell Catchpole’s resonant sound score further enhances the tone of evanescent dread.

And yet the show, for all its portentous content, somehow fails to convince or truly quicken the pulse. Neither does it engage one’s sympathies nor linger in the mind. In short, this polished but shallow theatrical plea on behalf of spiritualism does not quite add up to a satisfying experience.

Box office: 0114-249 6000, to March 10. Then March 13-31 at the Lyric Hammersmith, 0870 0500511

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