Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations is famously a novel concerned — besides much else — with class.

As delivered at the Playhouse last week by English Touring Theatre and Watford Palace Theatre, in a stage version scripted by Tanika Gupta, it also became a story concerned with race. Its setting is shifted from Kent to the countryside of India and, once the tale moves to the metropolis, from London to Calcutta. Instead of being uniformly white, the characters range across the colour spectrum. The jilted Miss Havisham (Lynn Farleigh) and her pompous lawyer Jaggers (Russell Dixon) become representatives of the white ruling class, the hero Pip (Tariq Jordan) and his family are Indians, while the lad’s benefactor as he is discovered to be, the ex-convict Magwitch (Jude Akuwudike), is a black African. This makes him, as he puts it, doubly an outcast. “I exist in a kind of netherworld,” he says, accepted by neither whites nor the Indians.

This new slant on the story actually works rather well to begin with, with the special ‘feel’ of India nicely caught by director Nikolai Foster and designer Colin Richmond. The trouble is that it adds an extra layer of confusion to what is already a complex tale, as most of Dickens’s are. In the half-hour leading towards the denouement one got the impression that the company had given up on the task of explaining who was who and what was what. Pip’s rival Bentley Drummle, for example, the eventual husband of Miss Havisham’s preposterously snooty ward, Estella (Simone James), was so fleetingly present as to be little more than a cipher.

And what did it all achieve? Only to show what is already well-known, that the English in India were not entirely ‘a good thing’ and that a regrettable sense of racial superiority was evident in their control of the sub-continent.

Even with his fortune, Pip — most sympathetically presented by Tariq Jordan — knows he will never join his friend Herbert Pocket — another fine performance from Giles Cooper — at the club and other social centres of Calcutta life.

I think we knew it too.