Original Sin, Crucible Theatre, Sheffield

Peter Gill gives Wedekind's Lulu a dramatic sex-change in his all-male revamp, Original Sin. Replacing the mythic femme fatale, the protagonist is now an 18-year-old boy, Angel, who is a serial lust-object for men with certain inclinations in 1890s London. The programme claims that this is "not a new adaptation or translation of the German master's work, but a totally new play". This, though, is misleading. In fact, it's precisely because Gill cleaves so closely to the original in terms of story and personnel, that puzzling problems arise.

As a piece of theatre, the show is utterly compelling throughout. Even the scene-changes exert a creepy power in Gill's superbly directed production. If Angel is the blank cheque for the desire of others, Alison Chitty's sombre black set is the blank screen that a team of footmen sparely furnish with the props that evoke the varied locations of Angel's rise and fall – from the sumptuous Parisian drawing room, peopled with berouged Proustian queens, to the squalid London attic where he meets his end at the hands of Jack the Ripper.

The sinisterly measured and methodical pace of these shifts, performed to distant, eerie music, create a forceful sense that what we are watching is as much ritual as drama – stages in the chronicle of a doom foretold.

Andrew Scott invests Angel with an unsettling rent-boy-at-the-Ritz allure, and as he veers between tantrum-tossed calculation and clinging neediness, his excellent performance suggests that the hero's compulsive contradictions may stem from the abuse he suffered as a child, snatched from the gutter and prostituted in more ways than one.

But the hermetic, homosexual world in which the hero now moves makes an awkward fit for Wedekind's story. For example, in a period rife with the threat of blackmail and rocked by scandals such as the Cleveland Street affair, it seems a bit unlikely that Michael Byrne's newspaper proprietor would follow his counterpart in the original and, at Angel's dictation, send off a riskily self-revealing letter to his aristocratic fiancée, breaking off their engagement.

Thematically, too, the transposition can be problematic. It's a piercing irony, in the heterosexual human zoo depicted by Wedekind, that the lone representative of selfless love is the tortured lesbian, Countess Geschwitz. The edge of that contrast is blunted in the same-sex subculture depicted here where the Countess's counterpart, Lord Henry Wantage (Richard Cant), comes across as a masochistic drip.

A key symbol in the original drama and in this adaptation is the portrait of Angel, the beauty of which remains pristine while its human subject suffers the ravages of cholera and poverty. It makes you regret that Gill has not opened open up the play and let his hero cross paths with, say, Dorian Gray, another fictional siren of the era whose relationship to his painted image was significantly different and whose career of sin would throw Angel's much less conventional descent into sharp relief.

Lulu wishes at one point that she could be her own male lover. Angel fantasises about being a woman: "Then I could marry myself. Be inside myself." This desire seems to be linked in his mind to a death-wish. Perhaps the ultimate self-penetration would be achieved as the victim of a sex-murder. But his own slaughter, harrowingly dramatised here, involves a hideous, yet obscurely heartening irony. For it's with a cry of defiant integrity that Angel seals his doom on the knife of the sodomising Ripper. Undeniably haunting, Original Sin could, you feel, have been even better if Gill had taken greater liberties with the material.

To 22 June (0114 249 6000)