Steptoe and Son, West Yorkshire Playhouse, review Back in 2005, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, now in their eighties, resurrected Steptoe and Son, their most cherished sitcom, for a stage vehicle that concluded the father-son saga of Albert and Harold in a flashback-driven finale - Murder at Oil Drum Lane. It clip-clopped, creaking as it went, all the way into the West End. Now Kneehigh's Emma Rice has welded four vintage episodes into a new, much more radical theatrical experience. I feel a cad for saying this but, having lamented the ploddy conventionality of its creators" theatrical effort, I think the pendulum swings too far in the opposite, experimental direction here. Rice and co faithfully give us the storyline and excerpted dialogue from the show's superb pilot, "The Offer," as well as "The Bird," "The Holiday" and "Two's Company." The double-act has been remodelled along warmer, Cornish-accented lines: Mike Shepherd's Albert cuts a far kindlier, less scrofulous and sneering figure than Wilfrid Brambell, while man-mountain Dean Nolan's Harold has little of Harry H Corbett's daft-brush delivery and much of the look of a circus-act. They put the case well enough for fighting free of pale imitation, but in seeking to stress the show's underlying sorrowful spirit, too many basic nuts and bolts of the comedy have wound up on the scrap-heap. Yes, these querulous rag-and-bonemen are caught in a faintly nightmarish state of co-dependency, confinement and thwarted happiness. With a moon overhanging Neil Murray's beautiful, spare set, with lots of junk piled inside or on top of a large wooden cart, intimations of Waiting for Godot are inescapable. But Beckett knew a thing or two about comic timing. While she adds some welcome flurries of music-hall physicality, Rice's pursuit of pathos, using haunting remixed period music to underscore the dialogue, reaps copious nostalgia but little laughter. Her biggest innovation lies in a female figure (played by Kirsty Woodward), who conjures each episode by listening to an old gramophone, steps into bit parts, lends a tantalising sense of Sixties sensuality - and at times embodies the dead wife and mourned mother whose absence maybe explains why Albert and Harold are stuck in a rut. The pair lip-synching to Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child rams the point further home but do we need such insistent melancholy? Much as I applaud Kneehigh's determination to liberate Steptoe from slavish emulation, in the end their maudlin approach points you back to the superiority and straightforward tragicomic joys of the small-screen original. Tour details: kneehigh.co.uk