The Dukes Theatre's annual outdoor production in Williamson Park is a tradition almost as venerable as the 1,001 Nights themselves. This year a wooded glade has been transformed into a Middle Eastern bazaar teeming with fine silks, hectic sounds and heady scents.
Suddenly, with a clatter of drums, bazoukis and whooping praise to Allah, a caravan of merchants appears and unpacks its cart amid the audience. These are dusty travellers from a distant land - from the direction of their coming, they could be from Morecambe.
The Arabian Nights makes for an ideal piece of open-air pageantry - the storylines are bold, the characterisation broad and the themes accessible. Les Smith's dramatisation is far from child's play, however. Antoine Galland's French translation first imported the tales to Europe, but it watered down their virility to 18th-century taste. They had originally been the evening entertainments of desert-hardened travellers, who were hardly going to skip the sex and violence so that Sinbad, Aladdin and Ali Baba could become the subjects of wholesome family fare.
Smith's selection reminds us that the Arabian Nights are as pungent a repository of fart jokes and uncouth comedy as anything in Chaucer. The audience lapped up the tale of Hassan and his flatulence, and the story of the woman who conceals four lovers in a chest of drawers and leaves it to become a water-feature as nature takes it course.
As dusk descends and the lanterns begin swinging in the trees, Ian Hasting's production adds magic to the mayhem. Evil djinns transform poor souls into monkeys, columns of flame become water, and giant scorpions and serpents engage in metaphysical battle.
All the cast are strong, with Bridgitta Roy particularly intense as Sharazad, whose narrative resourcefulness postponed her execution for 1,001 nights. Highly recommended, but with two important provisos. You'll want a blanket to sit on and plenty of insect repellent - the midges in this part of Persia are ferocious.
Until August 11. Box office: 01524 598500.
