Tim Crouch's I, Banquo - one of a trilogy of shows for children that offer a different perspective on Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest - is like a brilliant, bloody action painting. Accompanied only by a heavy-metal loving, guitar-playing 14-year-old Fleance, this Banquo casts us, the audience, as the bloody butcher Macbeth in a meditation on friendship, envy and imagination that makes you see the play afresh. Did Banquo ever feel a pang of jealousy for his best friend's apparent good luck? Did he think, "It could have been me?" When Macbeth first plunged the knife into Duncan, was it an act of self-murder, too, requiring him to kill his own imagination in order to perpetrate the deed?
This is not merely an intellectual exercise but also a visceral experience, too, one that never lets us forget that murder is messy. Up to his elbows in a bucket of blood, droplets flying through the air, Crouch transforms the stage into an abattoir, a place where life is snuffed out as easily as a candle and blood runs down the walls and his own body, mingling with the tartan.
If I, Banquo offers a fascinatingly skewed take on a familiar play, I, Peaseblossom offers a complete deconstruction of A Midsummer Night's Dream from the fairy who plays a minor role in the drama and has had a nightmare of a day. Anyone who has seen Crouch's extraordinary adult show An Oak Tree will recognise some of the techniques put into play here: involvement of the audience in the action; the undercutting of emotional material with comic; and a fascination not just with the subconscious but with the process of theatre itself.
As with I, Banquo, it is not for the very young or anyone who doesn't have a comfortable knowledge of the original play. But if only the plays were taught like this in schools, nobody would ever say Shakespeare was boring.
· Until October 10. Box office: 020 7645 0560.
