A throroughly modern Henry

This is Henry VIII as you've never seen him before: a lithe, trainer-clad, judo brown-belt who is a far cry from the usual overblown chicken-muncher of popular image. And this is Shakespeare's Henry VIII, a play habitually of set-piece tableaux and pageantry, like we've never seen it before: pacy, atmospheric and modern.

Phil Willmott's cheeky, yuppified reworking serves as an entertaining exercise in imagining the serial divorcé and original Defender of the Faith in a contemporary light. Mind you, it's a fairly elastic version. Willmott takes wild liberties with the text, reallocating speeches and scenes in order to give it a driving, political thriller gloss.

Such treatment has the effect of liberating the play's main characters - Henry, Wolsey, Katharine, Queen of Aragon, and Anne Bullen - but also of diminishing its scale. Cara Sweeney's Boleyn is effectively a gold-digging It-girl in smart little black dress and, in a work of always of contrasting fates, it's hard to establish pathos for

James Horne's spinmeister Wolsey when you see him reduced to feeding ducks in the park.

All the same, Willmott's topical approach (there is even a Trevor McDonald voice-over) is a breath of fresh air. Hansjorg Schmidt's zooming lighting design adds a thrilling edge, Simon Merrells makes an interestingly detached monarch and Katerina Jugati is a moving, rejected Queen Katharine.

Willmott's transpositions are welcome in another sense, too, even if the cut-and-paste reorganisation leaves a clear- speaking cast fighting to reground the language: unusually, they give us a real sense of the women's world within the political and the royal, rare in the Shakespearean canon.

Henry VIII