There is sparkle and wit in every element of a Forkbeard Fantasy production. Before the play begins, members of the audience drool over the playful foldout programmes and smile at the bizarre announcements encouraging us to take our seats.
When we do, we enter Forkbeard's trademark territory, somewhere between theatre and film, pantomime and revered dramatic texts. This time it's Shakespeare: specifically, the old-time fad of filming silent adaptations of his work for the fledgling big screen. The Old Queen Theatre, ineffectually managed by Desmond Fairybreath (Tim Britton), is foundering as its audience forsakes live drama for the moving image. How live the drama has been is questionable: Dame Theodora Liverwort (Chris Britton) has been playing young Miranda in The Tempest for 53 years.
So Fairybreath embraces film and the challenge of a silent Tempest. What follows is a madcap and inventive farce, self-referentially smart and highly silly. Characters move effortlessly between the realms of stage and screen in this darkly gothic tale that begins with a murder mystery and includes the theft of the Dame's voice.
The richly textured production thoughtfully contemplates the battle between theatre and the young upstart that is cinema, but, in the second act, it simply revels in the visual possibilities of melding the two. The Tempest goes ahead, with celluloid and scenery merging so that you can't see where one ends and the other begins. Spellbound, you no longer care. It's still funny - the speedy tying-up of loose ends in Shakespeare is much lampooned - but the dreamy beauty of where two representational worlds meet is what stays with you long after.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 020-8985 2424. At the Riverside Studios, London W6, from December 7-11. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
