Just when the pantomime season appeared to be over, along comes Kneehigh to breathe new life into this tricky mish-mash of a play. Just as Roy Williams' Days of Significance, which played earlier this month at the Swan in Stratford, was a response to Much Ado About Nothing, so Emma Rice and Carl Grose's version of Shakespeare's late romance picks up on elements of the original and transforms it into something fresh. It is like a piece of theatrical graffiti - ribald, unruly, scrawled and sprawling. It is the odd juxtapositions that make this interesting, even when, at almost three hours, it begins to outstay its welcome. Grief and hope nestle together; a panto dame rubs shoulders with tragedy.
The ancient Britain of the original becomes a more recognisably contemporary place, where Cymbeline is a drug addict controlled by his second wife. His daughter Imogen's would-be husband is a boorish, overgrown schoolboy. And the makeshift shrine to the lost, kidnapped princes, with its drooping posies and sad teddies, looks like both a political act of defiance and a reminder of a time before unhappily-ever-after.
This is a story of the state as family, set in a wire cage of a palace that has become an emotional prison for all who inhabit it. Shakespeare's verse has largely been binned, but Grose and Rice's text has its own sweet poetry. Mike Shepherd is good value as the broken king, and Amanda Lawrence's splinter-faced queen dissolves like the Wicked Witch of the West. Perhaps it doesn't quite break your heart in two as it should, but I distinctly heard mine crack as Hayley Carmichael's wonderful Imogen strode sturdily into the forest to face her future. I swear she was lit entirely from within.
· Until February 3. Box office: 08700 500 511. Then at Birmingham Rep, February 6-10. Box office: 0121-236 4455.
