If you are in any doubt that this adaptation of the 1952 Mary Norton novel has lost its way long before the interval, just check out the first big song of the second half. By this stage, the stakes should be high. The tiny creatures who live under the skirting boards, surviving off human scraps – borrowed not stolen – are under assault. The boorish Mrs Driver (Claire Storey), a “human bean” with a fetish for cleanliness, is sensing their presence and has inadvertently hoovered them up.

This is life-and-death stuff and demands an impassioned response. But what do we get? Only a song about paper planes. This duet between Young Eddie (Matthew Heywood), a 10-year-old boy, and Arrietty (Amy Tara), the 13-year-old Borrower he has befriended, comes complete with instructions about where to make the folds. In a show with few songs, it is weirdly tangential and does little to expand our understanding of Arrietty’s journey from claustrophobia to freedom.

The malaise sets in much earlier. Gitika Buttoo’s production starts off promisingly as Howard Chadwick’s Eddie joins us in the audience to check under our feet for signs of miniature life. He is a genial Scouser and a welcoming narrator who remembers spending a lonely summer in the leafy Haverbreaks district of Lancaster when his mum was ill.

Quite when this was is uncertain: it looks to be a postwar world of tank tops, superhero comics and handwritten train tickets, but there are also barcodes and TV remote controls. The scrappy set by Richard Foxton looks as though it has been put together on a Borrowers’ budget, the more so under the washed-out lighting design of Brent Lees. It is a production without atmosphere.

Chadwick, like the other five actors, puts his all into it and charms the young audience as he goes, but the script by Bea Roberts favours monologue over interaction and wordiness over action. It is hard to blame the actors for garbling such cumbersome lines or for trying to shout the script into dramatic life. We get little sense of the Borrowers’ resourcefulness, still less of their perilous quest to find safety. The little creatures go a very short way.

• At the Dukes, Lancaster, until 31 December