Wild and windy Moor

Now Northampton has joined Plymouth Theatre Royal and Frantic Assembly to collaborate on a radical reworking of Shakespeare's Othello. As part of a touring season it's at Northampton until Saturday.

If you're interested in cutting edge theatre, you owe it to yourself to see it. If you're a parent or grandparent you must take any teenagers in the family to see it. This show will do for theatrical performances of Shakespeare what Romeo+Juliet did on film.

It is simply brilliant. Bold to the point of being brazen, radical to the point of being ridiculous, adapters and directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett have transposed the action to a West Yorkshire pub. Centre stage is a crucial prop, a pool table, and there's a flashing fruit machine.

Everyone wears jeans, hoodies, trainers, baseball caps and the whole introductory buying of drinks and a bar fight is enacted in silence in Frantic Assembly's signature off-kilter choreography.

The narrative is well on its way before we hear a word of Shakespeare's verse. This is, bluntly, a bit of a problem. Dialect coach Sally Hague has done a fine job with the Yorkshire accents, but it must be admitted that the blank verse takes a bit of a battering.

But that is not what the piece is about. Energy, excitement, physical theatre with the accent on fizz, that's what mesmerises.

You can see why a one-issue play was chosen for this treatment - it's all pretty obvious what's going on, and the action is quite breathtaking at times. There's a ragged dance which somehow marries hip hop moves with graceful moments from a courtly gavotte which is quite stunning.

There will never again be an Othello death scene like this one, either, no matter how many more times the play is put on in centuries to come. Desdemona's legs shake like the fins of a fish out of water as she is held high aloft by the throat by her husband, prone on the pool table.

He then recoils, backing into the marvellously mobile set which recoils with him like something out of a Munch painting. Amazing stuff.

Marvellous technical achievements from all concerned by way of lighting, design and music with some terrific performances, as adept at drama as at humour.

Leila Crerar is a splendid Emilia, but the show is stolen by Charles Aitken's shell-suited Iago, persuasive and evil, a cross between Wayne Rooney and David Beckham with a grin like Heath Ledger's unhinged Joker sparingly flashed straight at the stalls. Remember the name.

The large number of A-level students in the audience applauded as if they'd just seen a rock concert. Don't tell me that's not a great sign for the future of live theatre.