After 10 years of being chided for running an upmarket pantomime house, Mark Rylance is out for revenge. His performance in The Storm - his last as artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe - is a shameless, critic-baiting masterclass in orchestrating audience participation and eliciting huge cheers.
When he plucks a punter from the front row to play a policeman in "plane clothes" (a pair of wings, boom boom), and stops the play to mourn the anachronisms in Peter Oswald's text, you can almost hear him blowing a raspberry at the reviewers in the gallery. But surely even cynics couldn't resist the moment when Rylance conjures up a lightning storm by encouraging the crowd to take pictures with their mobile phones. The crackling flashes are eerily beautiful - a neat reminder of how special a night at the Globe can be.
Tim Carroll's production is busy, littered with clunky dancing, bad singing and worse gags, many of which refer, with an irritatingly obvious ironic wink, to the stuff of modern life, from chocolate Hobnobs to Saturday Night Fever and the Co-op bank. There's plenty of time for silliness because Oswald's play is more holes than plot. Adapted from an equally ludicrous play by Plautus, it concerns Daemones, a rich man who gave away all his money and so was unable to pay the ransom when his young daughter was kidnapped. Twenty years on, she's now a prostitute called Palaestra and the subject of his unwitting affections.
The story is potentially moving, but the cast are so preoccupied with making us laugh that emotion doesn't have much room for manoeuvre; that Shakespearean trick of marrying low comedy with poignancy isn't achieved here. Still, there's an engaging energy and buoyancy to Oswald's writing, and the performances are so riotous that the whole daft enterprise is impossible to resist. Alex Hassell is particularly engaging as Plesidippus, throwing tantrums with aplomb, as is James Garnon as Sceparnio, the slave who craves freedom.
Rylance is curiously self-conscious by comparison, making this perhaps the first time in 10 years that he hasn't stolen a Globe show.
· In rep until September 30. Box office: 020-7401 9919.
