Once seen, David Niven is unforgettable. There sits his Peter Carter in his blazing Lancaster bomber, exuding English sang froid. Then he jauntily tells Kim Hunter’s dewy-eyed June, who chances to be in radio contact, that he’s baling out, unluckily without a parachute. Then cut to the grey-and-white afterworld, which can’t understand why he hasn’t joined the dead airmen thronging through its portals. So begins Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 Matter of Life and Death, one of the most eccentric films yet made.

But then eccentricity is what Kneehigh does. So don’t be surprised to find that the director Emma Rice has introduced loads of circus and balletic effects. I’m hard put to explain the nurses who lie on beds, pedalling on upended bicycles, but, like the aerial cavortings that follow, they are presumably meant to create a feeling of surreal wonder.

The piece needs that feel because it’s less exceptional than it seems. If Tristan Sturrock’s doughty Peter had simply suffered brain damage serious enough to need an operation, but was seen through it by Lyndsey Marshal’s doting June, it would be just another romantic tale. The notion that a celestial emissary has got lost in the Channel fog, allowing Peter temporarily to evade death and meet the girl, is an attempt to dress up an old, old story with spurious metaphysics – and the result can be pretty silly.

Rice and her co-adapter, Tom Morris, have made big changes to the film, not always for the better. The expansion of a rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a subplot involving a sickly, suicidal Bottom adds more confusion than dark magic.

And the ending, in which Peter pleads for life before a heavenly court, is unrecognisable. In the film, he was prosecuted by an angry 18th-century American for the crime of being English and fancying a Bostonian, which June then was. Here, his dead father and Shakespeare, along with widows from Coventry and Dresden, inexplicably press the claims of death over life.

Maybe this means that the piece, which originally reflected postwar tensions between our boys and the GIs, is now less dated. But neither that change nor the conversion of Heaven’s emissary into a fey Norwegian conjuror-cum-escapologist makes it better. Still, the introduction of Douglas Hodge as a wise GP adds class. And the period music, like the theatrical wizardry, can be diverting. I liked the stylised ping-pong Hodge plays with Marshal’s June – but not enough to feel that this was a play that mattered.

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