When you do something as ambitious as put on The Spanish Tragedy in King’s College Chapel, you are subject to the law of very ambitious things: for every chance you’ll get something spectacularly right, there’s an equal chance something will go wrong. And this production is almost evenly split between being soul-crunchingly good and frustratingly lacklustre. And, predictably, a lot of this has to do with the all-important setting.

The list of extraordinary things producer Debbie Farquhar and director Niall Wilson have thrown at this show is almost as overwhelming as the soaring, vaulted space that forms the venue. That mighty, wooden organ towering above the little figures below, blasting out doom-laden music from the trumpets of the two carved angels that cast terrifying shadows onto the ceiling above. The choir, singing their beautiful madrigals in between scenes, occasionally joined by the cast in a startlingly chilling rendition of Kyd’s 16th century verse. The acoustic of the place itself, making every line echo with the finality of the tomb.

As sensory experiences go, nothing else I have seen at university level matches it. Wilson understands deeply the possibilities of his space, and exploits them to their fullest. And yet I would have almost preferred the whole thing remained a purely aesthetic experience, a symbolist drama revelling in its bombardment of the senses.

For the play never gets better than the first spine tingling moment, as a funeral procession, hooded and masked with Italian hook-noses, appears from out of the darkness behind the audience to the sound of the organ, introducing Joey Akubeze’s ghostly Don Andrea. In its ethereal moments, this play totally succeeds, with Olivia Emden’s terrifying scarlet-clad Revenge intoning “the sickle comes not til the corn be ripe” from behind a veil outdoing any Hollywood chillerIn these moments it is a theatrical ghost story like no other, fired by the Gothic architecture around it to stir some very old fears in our stomachs. A scream sounds incredibly good in there.

But the setting doesn’t help the actors, and the play itself is somewhat drowned by what surrounds it. For the first and most important point, while I as a reviewer had a privileged front-row seat, many people further back couldn’t hear a thing: the echo of the Chapel, so good for choral music, swallows up anything but the most crisply pronounced verse into a melisma of sound.

It is very difficult to recommend a play that was incomprehensible for a large part of the audience; the echo of the tomb is a nice effect, but it gets wearying. The creators of the project knew this from the start, and haven’t overcome it. As for the production itself, I wonder what I would think of it on the ADC stage. The cast is a veritable check-list of our most prolific actors; it is strangely fun to see lead actors from ADC mainshows reduced to glorified furniture movers. But the acting is sharply divided in quality, with not everyone firing on full cylinders. Stephanie Aspin comes perilously close to running away with the show, her Bel-Imperia lithe, brittle, sharp and forlorn all at once. You can all but see the plotting-cogs whir behind her eyes.

But others have less vivacity – Sam Curry is a little too wet as Horatio, while George Johnston (who with Luka Krsljanin has a perpetual open shirt for apparently no other reason than that they both have nice chests) lacks authority as the villainous Lorenzo, his command of verse only ever workmanlike. When confined to the stage-area the storytelling is efficient but not enthralling, the direction assured, but rarely imaginative. And the show seems to occasionally lose the sense of its text – Temi Wilkey’s blackly funny line about murdering a man “because he walked abroad so late” is totally lost in the rush to keep the play moving.

This is brave, exciting theatre. It shows the best possible use of the space. It is heart-quickeningly atmospheric. But the space defeats the actors, who are dwarfed in all ways by the simple fact of the production. I would recommend this show as an experience, but as a story it is like a church sermon you can’t hear properly and wish had a bit more spice behind its delivery. Even so, more site-specific theatre in Cambridge, please.