Iceland's top geezer

You don't expect to come out of Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet swearing like a trooper. But last year's smash-hit Vesturport production had ecstatic audiences spilling out on the streets yelling the show's killer catchphrase: 'Speak f**king English!'

You're right, that line isn't in the original. But, far from sacrilegiously messing with a classic of English literature, the dynamic young Icelandic company caught the teen spirit of the star cross'd lovers' tale with refreshing vibrance. The odd character's lapse into Icelandic - hence the 'f**king' line - was a cheeky acknowledgement that foreign tongues can get tangled with Shakespearean rhythms.

What really caught the imagination was the way the actors roped in daring skills, from trapeze-swinging to shimmying down curtains, to add some bounce to the action. For Vesturport director Gisli Orn Gardarsson, who doubled as Romeo, it's down to a desire to stage the kind of spectaculars he'd want to see if he was in the audience.

'I'm really into using all of the theatre, not just the stage,' he says. 'I like the action to come exploding off the walls and into the air.'

That approach certainly struck a chord with Romeo And Juliet, a show so audience-friendly that celebrity actors in the audience wanted in on the action. What started out as a joke by Iceland's first lady, Dorrit Moussaieff, to her friend Sean Connery about whether he fancied a part, soon snowballed until everyone from Joanna Lumley to Jude Law and Dawn French were lining up to perform cameos.

'That was great and Romeo And Juliet opened up a lot of doors for us,' says Gardarsson. 'But it's not all about getting bigger and bigger. We've just done a play about an Icelandic fisherman where the actors hang off wires in a 3m2 box. It's like you're in a boat.'

There we go, hanging off stuff again. Perhaps it's time to point out that Gardarsson spent 15 years as a competitive gymnast, reaching international level before he back-flipped into theatre. 'The frustrating thing with gymnastics is that, even though you're at what amounts to a professional level, you don't make any money. So I thought that, well, if I am an actor, I can do that stuff and get paid.'

That freewheeling attitude is paying off because Gardarsson and Vesturport have been invited back to London to put their inimitable zip into Georg B¸chner's Woyzeck as part of the Young Genius season at the Barbican. The tragic tale of an everyman soldier against whom the fates conspire is, to put it mildly, harrowing stuff. But Gardarsson is keen to highlight the play's humanity.

'I always look for the lightness. Here in Iceland we don't really have an army, so the military side of the play we're not familiar with. But the story is really about jealousy and the way it can drive people to death. Woyzeck is jealous and that's an emotion everyone can understand.'

Proof of how rapidly Vesturport's star has risen is that Woyzeck boasts new songs by Nick Cave and Bad Seeds violinist Warren Ellis, a collaboration set up after Gardarsson saw a Cave gig in Reykjavik.