Pericles, National Theatre, Olivier, London

Monumental and magical

Shakespeare's strange, textually contentious late romance of flights by sea, shipwrecks, pelting misfortune and miraculous reunion has found its ideal director in Yukio Ninagawa. He, better than any theatre-magician alive, knows how to infuse ravishing stage pictures with yearning, elegiac emotion and how to create a soundscape of tingling, tintinnabulating wonder, underscored by a darker wash of stubborn, heart-snagging disharmony.

I thought I had got Ninagawa's measure and, indeed, in my opinion, he has sometimes delivered productions that were more decorative than properly engaged with the human substance of the drama they prettified. So it's a joy to say that Pericles marks not just a return to highest form, but in places a surpassing of it.

In his hands the world of medieval romance, with its seaborne escapes from mortal danger, fuses with the timeless, eternal plight of the refugee. At the start, ragged, wounded creatures, carrying children or stricken loved ones on their backs, toil down the aisles of the Olivier and gather on the monumental set, with its bullet-riddled surround, through which poke prongs of lights, and with its pervasive image of water falling from a host of taps into buckets. A symbol of hope and last-ditch refreshment, these spigots gush silently at moments of emotional release. To music that has a Samuel Barber quality of poignant hunger, the walking wounded take their bow and cede the stage to the two choral characters who take us through the story.

The pageant-like aspects of the play are beautifully conveyed in features such as the ritual dances of the tournament through which Masaaki Uchino's handsome and haunting Pericles wins his bride. The costumes are sumptuous: King Simonides, for example, wears a collar that makes him look as though his head is poking through some elaborately embroidered lavatory seat. The choral narrative sections are performed by actors playing puppets playing humans, and their activities are reflected in a screen of foxed mirrors.

The production is balm to the soul, though, rather than just top-grade eye candy. You see this in two sequences that achieve transcendency while cutting to the heart of the play. On the run from the incestuous secret he has unriddled in Antioch, the hero seemingly overcomes that nightmare in a happy marriage. But his wife "dies" in storm-tossed childbirth and he and his daughter are sundered. The stage is therefore set for a tragically unwitting repetition of incest. True, however, to his heartening belief in the recreative powers of the younger generation, Shakespeare crucially shows us Marina making better redemptive use of these years of separation than her father, who subsides into paralysing depression.

The breathtaking Yukio Tanaka takes on the roles of both wife and Marina. The combination of doll-like fragility and mettlesome strength with which she plays the latter is stupendous. Transported to a brothel and bid for by the Governor of the city, Tanaka moves into an utterly disarming dance display that seems both to unstop and control the complex of anxieties and hopes within her. It's a mesmerising mix of releasing and catching a bird and of martial spirit.

And when she is reunited with her father, she doesn't immediately fling her arms round him. She remains painfully stiff and uncertain in his embrace. This great actress shows piercingly how a daughter's reaction, in such circumstances, would have to melt by degrees from frozen traumatic confusion to protective solicitude. At the end, the whole story is reintegrated into the perpetual rhythms of refugeedom. Unforgettable.

In Japanese, with English surtitles. Ends Saturday (020-7452 3000)