Love is in the air

For anyone bored of Romeo and Juliet done to conventional death, this astonishing aerial show from Iceland, with trapezes and silken ropes for swinging lovers, comes as a rousing delight.

First seen at the Young Vic in 2003 and greeted then with some delight by critics, this modern dress production now arrives for a second visit which ought to attract the young in droves. Objections to the crude chopping down of the text and the panto mimic of some interpolated comedy turns must wait upon my enthusiasm.

For director Gisli Orn Gardarsson, who also plays Romeo, has hit upon a magnificently apt theatrical device to convey what it feels like to be caught by the first throes of sexual passion.

When Gardarsson's sexy, gymnastic Romeo floats through the air on a slow-moving trapeze to the balcony of Nina Dogg Filippusdottir's sturdy, mature-looking Juliet or both of them are closely entwined on a silken rope, the director captures a beautiful and complex sense of that elation, danger and false sense of freedom with which Eros dazzles his victims.

In the extraordinary closing tableau, actors representing corpses hang upside down on ropes. So, too, does Romeo, his body entangled in silk as though in deathly reprise of the lovers' first encounter.

Gardarsson's production, with Shakespeare valiantly spoken in English and occasionally in Icelandic, sadly remains overloaded and distracted by its comic slanting.

The montague-capulet feuding that leads to the death of Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson's witty mercutio seems surprisingly underemphasised in kick-boxing and trapeze encounters.

A bearded drag queen as the nurse, Paris transformed into a nightclub crooner and the servant Peter elevated to camp master-of - ceremonies all corstly disrupt the move of aerial lyricism with which Gardarsson renders the play sometimes strangely magical.

Closes 5 March. Information: 0870 0606631.

Romeo And Juliet