The Da Vinci Code

Robert Langdon, a Harvard expert in symbols and codes, is pulled into a murder investigation on a visit to Paris when a curator is found dead inside the Louvre, his body arranged as a strange clue. Working with Sophie Neveu, a French police cryptologist with her own connection to the victim, Langdon starts to unravel a trail of hidden messages built into some of the world's most famous paintings and buildings. As the two are chased by police and by a mysterious figure working for a secretive religious group, they follow the clues from Paris to London, each discovery raising bigger questions about a secret the murdered man was trying to protect.

The play is adapted by Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel from Dan Brown's 2003 novel of the same name, which was itself the basis for a 2006 feature film starring Tom Hanks. The stage version compresses the novel's globe-trotting plot into a lean, fast-paced production, using projection and design to move the action quickly between famous landmarks.

The pleasure here is the puzzle: the play keeps handing the audience a new coded clue, painting or anagram to work out alongside Langdon and Sophie, and the staging uses projected images and quick scene changes to keep the chase feeling cinematic rather than static. Watch for the odd-couple chemistry between the buttoned-up academic and the sharper, more skeptical Sophie, and for the shadowy figure trailing them, whose scenes carry the production's tension and menace. The tone throughout is brisk, suspenseful thriller, closer to a puzzle-box mystery than a courtroom drama, with a couple of darkly funny moments amid the danger. It suits fans of mystery and conspiracy stories, and anyone who enjoyed the novel or film and wants to see the puzzle solved live.