Ass you like it

Donkeys, witchcraft and sex... The Golden Ass has it all. Paul Taylor celebrates a classical adaptation without a toga in sight

There's a peculiarly high incidence of men being turned into donkeys in this year's season at Shakespeare's Globe. After Bottom's fate in A Midsummer Night's Dream, we now witness fortune making a literal ass of the hero of the theatre's new show – Peter Oswald's highly entertaining stage adaptation of The Golden Ass, the Latin novel by Lucius Apuleius from the second century AD.

There is not a toga in sight, though, in Tim Carroll's vigorous and inventive production. Instead of retreading the route of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, it deposits the proceedings in an atmosphere of dream-transmogrified music hall. Joke bobbies police the streets of Hypata, which throng with jugglers, fortune-tellers and hawkers vending everything from terrapins and Japanese seaweed to self-respect and sex. From a grotto clearly labelled "The Dreadful Robbers' Cave", as though it were a fairground ride, mustachioed brigands, who turn out to be rather camp Welsh windbags, make whizzing forays on micro-scooters. This artificial, cartoon-like world of witchery, where it seems that anything could happen and probably will, is presided over by the goddess Isis, who lives on the seashore, in disguise, selling – geddit? – ices.

At the centre of the maelstrom is Lucius, a young newcomer from strictly rational Athens, who is falling over himself with curiosity (especially about witchcraft) and demob-happy lust. After a knockabout drunken episode reduces him to an object of ridicule at the city's Festival of Laughter, he becomes more determined than ever to achieve the illicit magic powers that will rebuff fortune and turn him into an owl. But he rubs himself with the wrong stolen lotion and ends up transformed into a donkey, an animal with one solitary, if sizeable, point of superiority to man.

Deploying his matchless audience rapport, Mark Rylance is both hilarious and deeply moving as he switches from a fidgety, naïve toff in a sky-blue-trimmed boater to a grimy, donkey-jacketed prole with mouth-twisting dentures and an appendage-like mallet swinging between his legs. CS Lewis once described The Golden Ass as "a strange compound of picaresque novel, horror comic, mystagogue tract, pornography and stylistic experiment". The joy of Oswald's adaptation is that it manages to be alive to all of those tones as it traces a young man's initiation, through suffering and degradation, into religious responsibility in the service of Isis. It's a variety pack of a show, unified by the conviction that Carroll's vivid cast, playing multiple roles, bring to each of the performance modes.

The drama is full of inset stories that reflect on Lucius' experience – in particular, there's a long re-telling of the "Cupid and Psyche" myth in which Psyche's misplaced curiosity in wanting to break the taboo and discover the identity of her secret lover mirrors the hero's disastrous desire to penetrate the forbidden mysteries of magic. The episode is dramatised here in an exquisite mix of opera and hand-held puppetry, with – a characteristically tongue-in-cheek touch – the vengeful Venus represented by a giant manicured hand.

Rylance's direct yet understated performance gives a disarming sweetness even to those moments when his donkey-self postpones taking the antidote to sow a few unexpected oats. And he pulls you inside the despair of an oppressed creature that begins to think that its memories of being a man must be just the wild fantasies to which asses are prone. Not a show for all the family, but a treat for anyone over the age of 16.

Shakespeare's Globe, London SE1, to 29 Sept (020-7401 9919)