The Island Princess, Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Preaching to the converted

Bolts of sari silk hang in warm pearly-pink columns from the top balcony of the Swan Theatre. An onstage gamelan orchestra adds a reverberant urgency to the proceedings or a dreamy, chiming sense of the sybaritic. Behind the instrumentalists, the totem of a huge female-breasted god sits with palms raised. We are in 17th-century Indonesia and the atmosphere of this exotic location is captivatingly and economically conveyed in Greg Doran's spirited production of John Fletcher's 1621 play The Island Princess.

This is the latest revival in an enterprising Swan season that has already knocked the dust off such neglected items in the Jacobean canon as the Jonsonian London comedy, Eastward Ho!, and The Roman Actor, Massinger's shrewd tragedy about the troubled relationship that exists between tyrants and the theatrical profession. The addition of The Island Princess to this laudable, ongoing repertoire might be thought, however, to take the policy of exhuming rarities to the point of reductio ad absurdum.

According to the splendidly informative introduction to the programme-text, Fletcher's swashbuckling tragicomedy has not been seen in its original version for around 370 years. Its disappearance from view is not hard to account for. An adventure story involving Portuguese colonialists in the Spice Islands, the play had, scholars claim, a coded meaning for its first audiences. In the drama, there are two Portuguese rivals – the affected and ineffectual posturer, Ruy Dias (David Rintoul) and the passionate achiever Armusia – for the hand of the eponymous beauty, Quisara, whose brother the King has been taken captive by the native Governor of a neighbouring island. These competitors would have symbolised, it is argued, the conflicting claims of the Dutch and the English in their colonial battle for the Spice Islands. The success of the Francis Drake-like Armusia in marrying into the dynasty is reckoned to be a wishful turning-back of the clock and rewriting of history .

That whole dimension of the drama is impossible to resuscitate. But as an intriguing perspective on the colonial mentality of the era and on religious insecurities in an expanding world, the play is very much not a dead duck – even if there's nothing here remotely resembling the complexity of the relationship in The Tempest between Prospero and Caliban. A modern audience may find it significant that the heroic Armusia – all vehement, square-jawed self-conviction in Jamie Glover's powerful performance – wins over the luscious Quisara (Sasha Behar) more by his blistering verbal abuse of her religion than by any practical demonstration of the moral superiority of Christianity. Until she is safely drawn into the fold, the seductive princess is a figure of fear as well as of glamour.

The conversion process could easily work the other way. Spectators today will also note how Fletcher is careful to discredit, from the outset, the chief defender of the native faith. The supposed Moorish priest, who poses as the conscience of his people, is actually the treacherous neighbouring Governor (excellent Paul Bhattacharjee) in disguise and motivated by nothing higher than selfish, vengeful pique. Even so, this compromised villain is allowed to voice a startlingly near-the-knuckle indictment of devious colonial expansionism and its technological triumphs.

Refusing to add any protective layers of political correctness, Doran's vigorous production allows the material to speak for itself. Likewise, while gently guying some of the cruder aspects of the dramaturgy (the sudden, ludicrously momentous asides, say), the characterful cast play the piece for all its worth. The Island Princess may have to wait as long again for its next resurrection: meanwhile, it seems to be genuinely enjoying its day in the sun.

To 14 September (01789 403403)