Theatre: As it says in the good book...

Goodbye God-rock, farewell casts of millions. An Israeli production has reinvented the theatrical potential of the Bible.

Most dramatisations of the Bible fall into two genres: the spectacular, archaeologically exact and yet wondrous, of which Cecil B DeMille's parting of the Red Sea and Charlton Heston's sanitised Moses are the prime exhibits in cinema; and the more metaphorical, theatrical genre, with its maudlin clown-show or rock-star Jesus (Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar) or its Chagall-esque Joseph and His Technicolour Dreamcoat.

Both modes fall short of the great accumulation of myths and chronicles, fables and ironies, laws and prophecies of what Jews call the Hebrew Bible, and Christians the Old Testament. Spectacle cannot encompass without grandiosity the seriousness and struggle of the Hebrews' wrestling with their God. Metaphors from the circus or rock music can build a bridge with our culture now, but at the risk of infantilising these resonant and contradictory texts that are the template not only for the Jews, but for all monotheisms.

In Israel today, tugged between religion and secularism, and with a fiercely religious party, Shas, negotiating a strong place in the new coalition, it is even harder to clear a space to let these texts speak. Yet that is what Rina Yerushalmi has done in her two-evening theatre piece made from the heart of the Hebrew Bible, of which part one, Va Yomer. Va Yelech (And He Said. And He Walked) is coming next week as part of LIFT - the London International Festival of Theatre.

The work that she and her young Itim Ensemble, of the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, have done over the past four years is remarkable enough as a retrieval of a classic text that is central to its audience, and as a continually refreshed stream of stage images. But during the polarising years of the Netanyahu government - playing to the religious faction and played by them - her production is a reminder of the Bible's often harsh honesty and realism, amid a babble of boasting and bullying. It remains a descent into an underground cave of stories and images and new-minted concepts that echoes Israel's tortuous double identity, as a religion and as a nation.

Va Yomer. Va Yelech stages most of the Old Testament's "greatest hits" - the Creation, Adam and Eve, the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the sacrifice of Isaac, the Ten Commandments, and the trek to the Promised Land. But here they are divorced from the familiar imagery of Renaissance painting, gospel song associations, Sunday school story-telling. "I wanted to open a crack between what you know, and what is presented," says Yerushalmi. So she sets her show in a chameleonic arena of light, more like a dance space expanding and contracting than a theatre world of trustworthy realism. It suits this generative text, filled with beginnings. It mirrors Jewish culture, whose foundational commandments prohibit graven images and performance - at this month's opening of the Israeli parliament, three religious MPs walked out when a girls' choir sang, because rabbis teach that a woman singing is a woman naked.

Yerushalmi's stage images are as ambiguous, echoing and contrapuntal as her casting is unconventional. Young actors, clad in chic modern black, not ancestral robes, deliver a collage of texts, their story cross-cut with choric amplifications flash-forwarding into later voices of psalms and prophets. These express hope and confidence in God's support, but more often terror and premonition of destruction. It is at such moments that the piece seems to touch Jewish traumas. "Many spectators cry," says Yerushalmi. "I think it's the inner excitement of having a theatre experience that belongs to them. I don't think I could do it with a play. Maybe it's a collective biography - you come with so much of yourself. In a play, you have to learn a new code each time. Here, the code is known, and there is much more room to reflect."

The piece also hits Israel's current pressure-points. Kafka-esque scenes of male elders drafting maniacal religious restrictions resonate in a country where there is no secular marriage or divorce. Reeled out by priests like squabbling black crows, this litany of legislation looks like a desperate attempt to harness complex, corporeal humanity, which flowers in the depiction of the Ten Commandments, a seduction scene by the whole company, the women languorously rolling apples over their bodies, the men pursuing them with knives and forks. It's a rueful acknowledgement that the physical truth of human nature cannot be controlled. Jerusalem today may be under the rule of the severe rabbis and their interdictions; in sexy Tel Aviv, appetite is alive.

But what has driven Rina Yerushalmi to sustain an ensemble over four years is the attempt to describe the full cyclical pattern of Jewish experience in history.

The part two London will not see homes in on the archetypal politics of the Jews and their leaders. And They Bowed. And He Saw is almost Shakespearean in its portrayal of Saul, David and Solomon, "the kings of fear, greed and lust", as Yerushalmi calls them. The people's demand for a king, to lead their continual wars with neighbouring tribes, breaks the thread with God through the prophet Samuel, and ushers in the era of statecraft, rivalry, the duplicity of power. In a scene that subverts stereotypes, David, a red-nosed clown, overcomes Goliath, played by a towering woman on stilts. But soon lust drives him to have the husband of his lover Bathsheba killed at the battle front, and reasons of state finally lead to the murder of his rebellious son Absalom.

We have quit folk tale for full emotion, amplified by the prophets' hair- raising accounts of Jerusalem destroyed and the ache of exile in Babylon. A people is once more cast out and in search of its place. In the Bible text, the Jews are the subject; but in Tel Aviv today it doesn't require much imagination to shift the focus of this passionate, ambivalent story on to the parallel displacement of the Palestinians.

Yerushalmi's work marks a new departure in the context of Israeli theatre which has either grown out of the legacy of the Habimah, which came to Palestine from Russia in the Twenties and still practises outsize acting and European expressionism; or the more modern Cameri Theatre, playing the same contemporary repertoire as similar theatres around the world, though nourishing Israeli playwrights. But she was looking for something more deeply rooted. She began by staging award-winning productions of Hamlet, Wozzeck, and a Romeo and Juliet that toured to the Barbican and featured six different Romeos and Juliets, figuring the ecstatic explosion of time and space that is the experience of great love, as Shakespeare seizes it.

Now she had a company of actors she could start her biggest theatrical journey in a culture that has no drama of its own. "Hebraic time doesn't have that curve that the Greeks have. In Greek drama, you achieve something, then it is overturned, then things are resolved. But after Job, Jews had to explain human suffering, and they said, `Even if the good suffer, you have to do good. Time will come to an end - nobody says when - and then there will be salvation.' Meanwhile, you're just spending time before that happens, so there's nothing to achieve. It's cyclical. The Hebrew Bible tells the same story again and again, in different registers. So to write Hebrew drama has been almost impossible. Meanwhile, it's Beckett."

Beckett's flinty encouragement "Try again. Fail again. Fail better" could be Rina Yerushalmi's motto, and the epigraph of five millennia of Jewish existence. In the hard rock and white heat of the Middle East, Va Yomer. Va Yelech shows how, in theatre at least, it's possible to go beyond the tendentious simplifications of a time towards an open and complex reading of a timeless text.

`Va Yomer. Va Yelech' is at Three Mills Island Studios as part of LIFT, 24-27 June (0171-638 8891)