For the final instalment of its season of 20th-century classics, the BBC left the world of fiction behind and took a Rosie-tinted amble along the leafy byways of Laurie Lee’s youth. The first part of Lee’s autobiographical trilogy is much the most read. Sales of six million means Cider with Rosie has a lot of fans who will have watched this dramatisation anxiously fearing the worst.

Last February, director Sally Cookson shrunk Charlotte Brontë’s 400-page novel Jane Eyre down to a four-and-a-half-hour play spread across two nights at the Bristol Old Vic. Now, as this co-production finally arrives at the National Theatre, it has slimmed still further – shedding one hour and one night to become a (comparatively) brisk Hamlet-length evening of physically and sensorily-charged theatre.

The Trojan War has been going on for nine years when Homer's account begins in The Iliad. Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes have been developing their version of the story, using Christopher Logue's War Music, for nearly half as long. True, when they staged The Persians by Aeschylus for National Theatre Wales in 2010, The Iliad was not yet on the agenda, but now they say that a through-line is clear from that production to their present National Theatre Wales project.

I am writing this in the sun after many days on the trot spent from morning until 11 at night in Jane Eyre’s wonderful new home at the National Theatre. During previews we work every day, refining, changing, have a quick dinner break and then perform a preview performance. It’s the culmination of over two years of living with this story, since Sally Cookson first contacted me in late spring 2013 to discuss her plan to turn this extraordinary book into a piece of theatre.

The major controversy of this revisionist BBC adaptation is not DH Lawrence’s naughty bits, but the lack of them. Gone are the four-letter words and personified genitals – just one half-embarrassed mention of “John Thomas” – while graphic sexual descriptions are replaced by soft-focus, coyly implicit lovemaking.

The original idea for the subtitle of this show, first made in 2000 and last seen at Sadler's Wells in 2007, was apparently "An Auto-Erotic Thriller". Yes, groan. But "erotic thriller" is a much straighter description of The Car Man than its actual, rather coy, subtitle, "Bizet's Carmen Reimagined". This is a nail-biting ride, and certainly not suitable for kids.

Kafka and Jones, the names above this little shop of horrors, would be a marriage made in off-kilter theatreland had the Czech genius written any plays. He didn’t, so Nick Gill has made a well-shaped drama out of the assembled fragments of which The Trial consists.

So many plays and musicals are adapted from films (Bend it Like Beckham is up next) that it comes as something of a throwback to find a film that takes as its source an acclaimed musical play. The sheer fact that there is a movie of London Road is doubly extraordinary when one considers that the widely acclaimed theatre production from 2011 was anomalous even as a stage show, let alone transposed to the screen. A piece of verbatim theatre conceived very much without take-home numbers but scored to the jagged, often discordant music of the composer Adam Cork, London Road seemed to want to shift the landscape of what the musical theatre could look and sound like. So the happy surprise, from this corner at least, is that the film version is even better. 

The writer Alecky Blythe took her tape recorder into the homes of the inhabitants of the Ipswich street that has given the show and now the film its title and was at the epicentre of the shock waves sent out nationally in 2006 when a forklift truck-driver by the name of Steve Wright and from that very road was found guilty of the murder of five prostitutes.

Weaving a skilfully layered mosaic of reaction and response that ranges from sorrow to outrage, paranoia through to something approaching glee (one chap derides the murdered women as "foul-mouthed slags"), Blythe along with Cork and under the ever-watchful eye of Norris offer a portrait of a community under siege that is seen by the end to begin to heal: hanging baskets full of flowers are co-opted for their full metaphoric weight and then some. 

Onstage, in fact, the symbolic heft of the floral abundance was itself a bit, um, florid, and there was scant escaping the impression that we were watching a well-drilled team of actors pretending to be characters and a community that they were not. The performances, however technically accomplished, felt as if they were on the outside looking in, and it was difficult not to detect a whiff of condescension surrounding the enterprise, however inadvertent that surely was. (I remember pondering what Mike Leigh might have done with much the same material.) 

Well, what a difference a shift in genres can make. Making full use of the panoramic possibilities that film allows, Norris has widened out his perspective to up the emotional stakes while also deepening one's sense of an enclave that risks erosion from within faced with the prospect of a murderer in your midst. Norris's prowling camera teases us from the start with the repeated sight of an apparently solitary man, Dodge (Paul Thornley), who acts as a lightning rod for the gathering alarm that is seen to take over the citizenry as a whole. As before, our way into the narrative is via chatty single mum Julie (Olivia Colman, pictured above), whose gradually evident lack of empathy leads to the single most startling line in the piece – a remark, present as well onstage, that is best discovered for oneself. 

Colman is one of several starry additions to the ensemble that performed the play at the National, who have themselves been retained for the movie but sometimes in a smaller role. Lending putative box office wattage is Tom Hardy (pictured left) in a sturdy seven-minute turn as a know-all cabbie quick to emphasise that just because he has made a study of serial killers doesn't mean he is one. And, in an intriguing demotion of sorts that nonetheless plays to her strengths, the Olivier-nominated stage Julie, Kate Fleetwood, here is seen as the hooded representative of the working girls whose lives have been put at risk, her ever-furtive gaze of a piece with the suspicion that looks to be growing far more quickly (at least at first) than any of those necessarily symbolic baskets.

Working with an A-list cinematographer in Danny Cohen (Les Misérables), Norris lends a desaturated visual cool to proceedings whose holiday-time occurrences make for some chilling vignettes all their own: the eerie plastic Santa seen in the stage production reappears here, and there's a startling moment – mordantly funny in tone – during "It Could be Him" (one of the song titles) when mannequins in a men's clothing store become objects of suspicion and scorn. 

This director's confidence behind the camera exponentially amplified since his wildly OTT debut film Broken three years ago, London Road could be subtitled Restored or Made Whole in its climactic implication that those involved find a way forward, albeit at a grievous price: "it took [the prostitutes'] lives for them to help us," as is made clear. And through it all is Cork's insistent, sometimes jarring, always-arresting soundscape that trades in conventional musical theatre uplift for something more quietly forensic, Cork glimpsed near the end as a pianist who catches the Fleetwood character's eye some while after he and his colleagues have caught us in this rewarding film's grip.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for London Road