Vertigo Thursday, November 2 until Saturday, November 4, Rondo Theatre, Bath

Atmospheric theatre in classic film noir style comes to the Rondo from November 2-4, when Red Shift Theatre Company presents Vertigo.

Vertigo is the third in their series of innovative theatre productions drawing on source material best known through landmark movies. It follows hot on the heels of highly successful adaptations of The Third Man and Get Carter.

Best known as Hitchcock's classic movie, Vertigo is a remarkable genre-hopping psychological thriller with an ending to equal The Usual Suspects. Writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the joint authors of a series of gothic pulp thrillers, have given cinema some of its most fascinating and enduring source material.

The Red Shift production, adapted and directed by Jonathan Holloway, sidesteps the film version and goes back to the original novel, in the process uncovering a lost gem. The production was given rave reviews on BBC Radio 4's Front Row when it opened recently in London.

Vertigo is set in 1940s Paris, as the Germans mass on the French border and invasion is imminent. Roger Flaviere - stricken with vertigo and sickened with guilt after causing the death of a colleague - is asked to follow a friend's wife in order to discover her secrets.

Bewitched by Madeleine, Roger becomes increasingly involved with her, but his fragile state of mind is shattered by her suicide. As France sinks under the nightmare of Nazi occupation, he descends into his own private drink-fuelled hell of lies, grief and guilt.

Five years pass, and he is shocked to the core when he sees Madeleine's face on a cinema newsreel. He embarks on a quest to find her - a quest that reveals his own part in a terrible crime of which he has been totally ignorant.