This is tremendous fun. Creation Theatre has cooked up an Alchemist that must be as bouncy and silly and straight-up funny as any production since its premiere over 400 years ago (in Oxford, incidentally, due to plague outbreaks in London).

The plot, in brief: a servant lets his absent master's house to a pair of con artists, and the trio perform ridiculous and very expensive magic for a series of greedy and gullible citizens. It's a delight to see the quick changes between these characters deftly performed by Emily Woodward, Claire Redcliffe and the acrobatic Clive Duncan, and a further joy, a play within a play, to be in on the con and see the instant persona changes of the two leads, Herb Cuanalo as the servant Jeremy/Face and Nicholas Osmond as Subtle, the alchemist. Osmond flicks in the change of a shirt from a scruffy lout to a Sherlockian mage to a highly-strung self-flagelling mystic, and Cuanalo, for me, steals the piece at the end with a change wrought by a pair of glasses and a walk.

It's quite a bold move to perform this in the round under bright steady lighting in a Maths Institute common room. The lights don't (can't?) go down and you're initially quite aware of the rest of the audience around and opposite you. The cast, however, by their complete ease in the use of the space and their ferocious focus on their own story, somehow manage to create and maintain a perfect distinction between stage and spectators throughout. This is actually helped by their absent-minded asides to audience members: "Here, hold this would you? Now then!", which make the audience part of the furniture and about as distracting. The whole set, costumes and props, probably fit inside the two suitcases which are themselves part of the plot: it's an astonishing demonstration of world-building on a shoestring. The sound effects (Patrick Stockbridge) and snazzy costumes (Delphine Du Barry) bring the play forward to roughly "now" and strongly support the action without being over-intrusive.

The real glory of the production is the total command of what is by now, like any 400 year old comedy, a rather dusty text. Director Anna Tolputt has interpreted it with a passionate enthusiasm which not only does not preclude but I can see how it encouraged the many affectionately irreverent updates. Every line counts, and parts I've never understood, thanks to meaningful between-the-lines exchanges, are suddenly coherent and hilarious. It's a very slick, high-energy, thoroughly entertaining production and you should definitely go.