At its most basic and most essential, theatre has always been about storytelling, whether it is the huge cast narratives of something like the RSC's renowned Nicholas Nickleby, or Arabian Nights and Tim Supple's celebrated version of Grimm Tales at the Young Vic.
Supple is back at the Young Vic with an RSC production that takes 10 stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses, as translated by Ted Hughes, and adapts them for the stage. Alas, this is no Grimm Tales, not least because it is so much more knowingly artful.
This is an evening that stands as a stern warning about the dangers of excess and desire: Myrrha's illicit lust for her father, which sees her entombed in a tree like a mummy; the desire of both Echo and Narcissus, which is so strong that it destroys them; Midas's foolishness and greed; and Tereus's rape of Philomela, which leads to a gruesome revenge. But the production is far too well-bred and restrained, as if it is scared of frightening the audience by any demonstration of real passion. Even the male nudity has a coy, let's-make-'em-laugh quality.
What these stories demand is a magnificent simplicity in the staging that matches the fierce intensity of Hughes's poetry. On occasion it does: Salmacis and Hermaphroditus's union in a filmy tunnel of material makes you catch your breath, and Minerva's revenge on Arachne, which sees her rival being turned into a spider caught in a web, is worth the price of a ticket alone.
But too often the cast merely seem to be illustrating what the writing already does better in terms of conjuring images, even though Melly Still's design provides the sparest of canvasses, with its burnished rectangle set in a surround of sand with only a pile of autumnal leaves for decoration.
There are other difficulties here too. True, many of these stories are familiar either from school or as sources for other works, particularly Shakespeare, but they are not burned onto our subconscious in the same way as European fairytales such as Snow White or Red Riding Hood. They are not archetypal. Neither are they framed in a way that allows the audience to make a direct connection between their own lives and what happens on stage.
Arabian Nights, another success at this address, worked because it was about so much more than the individual stories. It was about the power of storytelling itself and the way that sitting in the dark in the theatre can heal grief.
At half the length and double the intensity, this show might work very well indeed. But at the moment, for all the actors' skill and their ability to turn themselves into flowers, birds, beasts and trees with the enthusiasm of children, there is something unsatisfying about the piece.
• At the Young Vic, London SE1 (020-7928 6363), till July 22.
