Cymbeline, Shakespeare's Globe, London

A masterly reappraisal

The globe has made the welcome innovation this season of recruiting front-rank directors, and of giving them their head instead of expecting them to work towards the dubious goal of "authenticity". It's a policy that pays off superbly with Mike Alfreds's excellent staging of Cymbeline. With his renowned companies Shared Experience and Method and Madness, Alfreds developed a distinctive style that enables him to present this sprawling, late-Shakespearean romance as an exuberant exercise in stripped-down, fleet-footed ensemble story-telling.

It might seem doomed folly to impose a unified aesthetic on a play that is a ragbag of fairy-tale motifs and favourite Bardic preoccupations, restlessly moving between ancient Britain, the mountains of Wales and a Rome straddled between classical antiquity and the Renaissance. But Alfreds achieves this in a production beautifully alive both to what is self-mocking in Shakespeare's re- flexive handling of convention, and to what is deeply haunting in its story of a love almost destroyed by sexual jealousy and of erring parents reunited with their long-lost children.

Alfreds's radical approach has a wondrous clarity. The populous cast of characters is played by a company of just six actors, who all wear the same pyjama-like white costumes (itself a droll touch, given that the plot depends upon disguise and mistaken identity). There's an almost Japanese minimalism, with much of the Globe's ornate decoration blanked out, while on-stage percussionists create a subtle gamelan sound with chimes, gongs and xylophones. Even the stiff, fan-like scrolls the characters peruse produce a stylised, dry rattle.

This heightened bareness allows lightning transitions and promotes a powerful imaginative complicity with the audience. One moment we are at a meeting in ancient Britain; then a gong is struck, an actor announces "Rome" and the same performers lounge in an impishly Roman manner. And instead of making a showy descent in thunder and lightning, an actor simply thrusts his arms heavenward and we instantly believe that he is the god Jupiter in the crucial theophany. The narrative line is always shimmering and taut.

Jane Arnfield is a radiantly mettlesome Imogen, turning a giddy cartwheel at the prospect of being reunited with her lover, while the splendid John Ramm is full of machiavellian relish as the Iago-like schemer, Iachimo. But the outstanding performances come from the Globe's artistic director, Mark Rylance who, even in the tiny part of a physician who is wary of the wicked queen, can convulse the audience with laughter with his little aside "I do not like her". His virtuosic feat is to play both intense hero, Posthumus and his oafish inverted image, the Queen's well-named son, Cloten. Locked into an absurd he-man posture and straining to communicate the simplest thoughts in his plummy drawl, Rylance turns this latter into an unforgettably funny, yet touching study of jutting-jawed, upper-class stupidity and ven-gefulness. A masterly portrait in a terrifically fresh reappraisal of this play.

To 23 Sept (020-7401 9919)