Ethel Lina White is not a highly-rated writer today, but she has her place in film history. After two straight novels in the 1930s, she tried her hand at a thriller and wrote The Wheel Spins, published in 1936, writes David Bellan.

The film-rights were almost instantly snapped up, and, re-titled The Lady Vanishes and, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, it became one of the great British films of its period, and still stands up wonderfully today.

It is always dangerous to try to create a screen classic on the stage -- or even again on film, as the producers of the appalling 1979 remake discovered, but Andrew Taylor's adaptation of Launder and Gilliat's screenplay provides a highly entertaining evening (at the Everyman Cheltenham until Saturday).

The story takes place almost completely on a train crossing the Balkans with a bunch of posh English characters, and a cross-section of rather suspicious foreigners. Iris is befriended by a garrulous, elderly English governess who suddenly vanishes while the train is in motion.

Every person on board, with the exception of the initially annoying Gilbert, denies that such a person ever existed, but Iris is determined to find out the truth.

From here on, we have an intriguing story of top-secret messages being carried back to London in the form of a song, a mysterious veiled baroness, a highly suspicious magician, and two cricket-mad Englishmen whose only concern is to get back to England in time for the test match.

One review of the film declared that if it were not such a brilliant melodrama, we should class it as a brilliant comedy, and this assessment fits the stage version too.

Today's audiences are, of course, much more sophisticated than those of the 1930s when it comes to thrillers, and so it is probably the comic aspect, coupled with the well-achieved period feel, that makes this play so enjoyable.

Frances Cuka is just right as Miss Froy, the vanishing governess, in her green hat and tweedy costume, slightly bossy yet immensely likeable. Caroline Trowbridge in the central character is a gutsy, attractive young Englishwoman eventually drawn to Edward Baker-Duly's Gilbert, while Bob Docherty and Robin Harvey Edwards get a lot of laughs as Charters and Caldicott, to whom the mysteries of cricket are more appealing than the extraordinary events taking place on the train.

This is a very talky play with a lot of humour and also some real intrigue, but although the momentum sags occasionally, and there are moments when one wishes for a bit more action, it is great fun.

Finally, praise for Mark Balley's set. The train coach is built across the whole stage; the doors and windows of the compartments are on a sliding track, allowing us to join the action in one compartment as another is covered up again. It is ingenious and most effective.