Carmen
***
Watermill, Newbury

No, not the opera. Director John Doyle has gone back to the original novel, transposed the entire story to the Spanish civil war and tacked on Bizet's melodies with new orchestrations. The result is an original and enjoyable piece of music theatre played by a band of eight actor-musicians who swap instruments and roles with equal skill.

Doyle has been pioneering these small-scale shows for some years now, and with considerable success. If the stage here is sometimes over-busy, the intimacy of the Watermill's auditorium ensures that the piece has a devastating emotional impact.

The scale may be small, but Doyle's ideas are all big: war, religion and sex are entwined in an earthy, sweaty carnival of love and death. Carmen's sudden end comes in a screech of silence, the pop of a gun and a chalice of red wine dribbling onto the floor. The air is thick with incense and whispered Hail Marys. Yet nothing can ward off the fatal conclusion of the piece.

Love is like a war here. Doyle strips away Bizet's romanticism and replaces it with something dirty, almost rank, but very seductive. For the women, sex is a weapon; for the men it is a little death. Even the music and singing is, at times, harsh, like a banshee wail.

This is all good stuff, although the intensity of the evening is a little wearing and the piece would be great at 75 minutes, not two hours. But it is boldly done and the cast led by Karen Mann's powerful, earthy Carmen - no romantic waif but a mature, sturdy woman - are top-notch. A reminder that the music theatre being done here and at the Bridewell can be as invigorating and radical as drama at other, more glamorous addresses.

Till August 26. Box office: 01635 46044.

***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible