When I come across yet another stage adaptation of a successful film, I usually suggest that my readers treat themselves to a DVD of the original; and, yes, anybody who hasn’t seen Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s screen version of On the Waterfront should plug that gap.

But there are plenty of people who won’t follow my advice or have seen the movie and don’t feel like revisiting it on something as shrunken as a telly – and for them Steven Berkoff’s adaptation of Budd Schulberg’s screenplay should prove an exhilaratingly alive substitute.

The look is black-and-white, with both Schulberg’s exploited longshoremen and their corrupt union masters in dark caps, hats, overcoats and donkey-jackets caught in murky light against a cutout of the New York skyline circa 1954. And that’s not merely a tribute to a film that would have been cheapened by colour but gives Berkoff’s production the feel of a Greek tragedy. Euripides would surely have appreciated the tale of the modern Hercules, Terry Malloy, who rouses himself from stupidity and slumber to perform a new labour, that of conquering the mobsters who have robbed and cheated and murdered men, among them his own brother.

The mythic sense is bolstered by the surreal, almost balletic effects that Berkoff, that master of physical bravura, has so often embraced during his career. Sometimes this merely means slow-motion walking, as if characters were spacemen on the Moon or divers on the seabed. Sometimes it consists of stylised flurries of movement, or moments of mime, or simple standing in straight lines. This not only adds gravity to the proceedings but becomes an imaginative substitute for what a 12-person cast can’t achieve: the crowds at the dock gates, the fights, the elaborate “accidents” in which men are pushed off a roof or crushed by falling cargo.

But Berkoff never loses touch with graphic reality. The Euripidean-style clutch or chorus of workers suddenly become mobsters slouched over the racing pages. And there are fine performances: a vast, seethingly angry Sam Douglas as the villain played by Lee J. Cobb in the film; Vincenzo Nicoli as the priest who, in a ringingly eloquent passage, sees the crucified Christ in the faces of the abused workers; and, especially, Simon Merrells as Terry.

I took a look at Brando’s performance on my own telly before visiting Nottingham and was struck less by his gum-chewing realism than by the extraordinary, often surprisingly delicate lights and darks on that infinitely mobile face of his. Well, I’m not pushing Merrells as the next Marlon. But not only can he slouch, slurp, even skip like the boxer that Terry once was: he can subtly express the bafflement and pain of a man who unwillingly, unpretentiously evolves from an antihero into a hero. He’s quite a find.

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