Strange and serious magic

The stage is full of strangeness; it reeks of serious magic. His Dark Materials flings down a forceful challenge about organised religion to the teenage audience it mainly addresses, to older free-thinkers and those who keep faith in Christianity.

Philip Pullman's trilogy of children's novels, with its parallel universes and heavy trip to the land of the dead, its flying witches, talking bears and shrieking harpies, not to mention six-inch-high, poison-bearing midgets astride dragon-flies, is compellingly transferred from 1,600 pages of text to six hours' remarkable performance-time on stage.

Nicholas Wright's adaptation at first talks down to the audience, only finding the right tone later. But Nicholas Hytner's grandly operatic, beautifully acted production does not shrink from emphasising that His Dark Materials is a sort of antireligious Paradise Redesigned: Lyra, Pullman's spunky, 12-year-old heroine, and for whom the twentysomething Anna Maxwell Martin eloquently adopts early teenage manners, is a modern-dress version of Garden of Eden Eve.

She is not, though, of our world. For in her society everyone is attached to an animal-like daemon, their equivalent of a soul. These daemons attract a "dust", an essence of individuality that the Church seeks to eradicate. Lyra ends up as a triumphant spiritual leader rather than a guilty reject from Eden. With the aid of her truth-telling machine and the magic knife of her friend Will she rescues a substantial piece of the world from Christianity's fierce, controlling hands.

The business of transferring this trilogy's worlds of fantasy, its dream-like invention of daemons, cliff-ghasts and spectres to the stage is always a daunting one. Neither Giles Cadle's sets nor Jonathan Dove's conventional music, with its Wagnerian and Sibelian echoes, are exotically strange enough.

But Hytner's staging has oodles of narrative zest as it whisks between the freezing northern hemisphere, an almost deserted seaside world and acres of dead trees, green seas and yellow clouds.The stage revolves, sinks down, rears up to reveal a sunken room of church men conspiring to murder Lyra or a floating hydrogen balloon.

Spell-bindingly, a canoe, manned by John Carlisle's wonderful, sepulchral rower, floats down in a dark haze. And the journey by Lyra and Will to the misty land of the dead, all murky with ghosts reflected in a huge rear mirror, achieves nightmareish vigour. Wright, though not making the narrative outline clear enough, astutely hits upon a poignant, Stoppardian, flashback device to frame the action. It begins and ends in the Oxford Botanical Gardens, where a late teenage Lyra and Will, hopeless lovers fated to live apart since they come from different worlds, meet once again.

Comic elements quite absent from the trilogy, are discovered too. The daemons, designed by Michael Curry, are vivid animal puppets. Operated by black-costumed puppeteers they cause regular amusement with their half-human gesturing. Danny Sapani's excellent warrior bear, who holds a mask and speaks in mournful bass tones, bridges the gap between the human and animal.

Ben Wright makes a vivid impression as the golden monkey who belongs to Lyra's treacherous femme fatale of a mother, Mrs Coulter. Stephen Greif 's head cleric, seething with aggressive malevolence and Tim McMullan's sinister Genevan emissary introduce welcome elements of comic satire. So too do Nick Sampson and Jason Thorpe as two campish, gay angels in love.

Miss Hodge, hampered by a heavy cold on Saturday, did not muster enough hypocritical guile as Mrs Coulter, that devious, dangerous servant of the Church who makes the turn-coat her fashion accessory.