Sheherazade's revenge

Call it an over-reaction if you like, but King Shahrayar's murder of a succession of 1,000 brides after the discovery of his wife's infidelity gave rise to one of world literature's delights: The Arabian Nights. When the gifted, brave Sheherazade volunteers to be his next bride, she endlessly postpones her execution by her gift of storytelling. The king is so eager to hear her stories that she is allowed to continue for 1,001 nights, talking to save her life. Her stories make up the collection known as The 1,001 Nights or The Arabian Nights.

This story of the mythical, ancient King, Shahrayar, and the Vizier's daughter, Sheherazade, provides a frame for the stories she tells, which in turn frame others, since characters in the stories themselves tell stories, creating a potentially infinite series of stories within stories. This is one of the aspects of the Nights that has fascinated readers over the centuries, since the tales first appeared in manuscript form, in Arabic, in the 13th century.

Of diverse Indian, Persian and Arabic origin, the stories include fables, fairytales and heroic epics, which were first circulated orally. They are part folklore, part literature, with formal characteristics of oral culture such as the recurrence of similar plot devices, which functioned as building blocks that could easily be re-arranged by their oral narrators.

Since their first European translation by Antoine Galland in the early 18th century, the Nights have coloured Western images of Oriental exoticism, and have captured the imagination of writers as diverse as Coleridge, Proust, Borges and, most recently, Salman Rushdie, whose playful, intertextual children's book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, draws heavily on them. Versions of some of the more popular tales - Sinbad, Aladdin and Ali Baba - regularly pop up in pantomime and are still embedded in the canon of children's literature.

Dominic Cooke's adaptation for adults and older children, performed by the Young Vic Theatre Company, delicately emphasises the moral lessons of the tales and their connection to the framing story of Shahrayar and Sheherazade: he must learn how to forgive and to love again, and her stories will help him to do that. "When she had told him her stories for 1,001 nights, she tested the King to see if the flower in his heart had bloomed and whether he was ready to save the life of his wife and unborn child . . . "

But there's nothing heavy-handed or didactic about this inventive ensemble production, which premiered last Christmas and has recently toured the UK, including the Edinburgh Festival, where Georgia Sion's gorgeous stage and costume design won an award. Played on a sand-covered disc with dappled, kaleidoscopic lighting, the stories spill out and fluidly overlap, with tingling percussion and choreographed movement, while Sheherazade and her King look on from the back of the stage.

The nine actors in this multiracial cast play all the parts, as well as animals and props, undulating rivers and forests. Sinbad the Sailor is a puppet who flies off on a miniature magic carpet. In the opening tale of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, the thieves are a shifting chorus, becoming horses, the magical cave and, when they turn their black cloaks around to reveal the glittering gold lining, they become the treasure trove itself, dazzling and seducing Ali Baba. This is story theatre, reminiscent of the style of Peter Brooke's epic production of Mahabharata, with all of the actors narrating as well as playing in a sequence of rapidly changing scenes. The constant switching from narrating to performing imposes simplicity and clarity of performance. Every word and gesture must be projected and writ large; this is both limiting and demanding for the actors.

Chatting to members of the cast recently after a performance in the Theatre Royal in Newcastle, they seem to find the restrictions imposed by the style rewarding. "It means you can't indulge yourself with big emotional moments," says Yasmin Wilde, who plays at least five different roles. "It's difficult, but it's also really dynamic." For Rohan Siva, fresh out of RADA and making his professional debut in this production, "storytelling is the basis of theatre. It's essential to be able to get this right. I found it really difficult in the beginning to switch from being in character to being a neutral narrator, but now I see how valuable that is".

They are joined by Jonny Hoskins, who plays a range of comic characters from beggars to dogs, and all three speak glowingly of the show's director, Dominic Cooke, who's now assistant director at the Royal Court. "He wants to transcend the everyday in theatre and to give people hope. It's much easier to reach children in this way than adults, so he likes to have lots of kids in the audience. They make the adults open up," Yasmin Wilde says.

And they do. When a body (in puppet form) is gruesomely sliced into quarters on stage by the 40 thieves and then sewn back together by a cobbler, the little boy in front of me stands up on his seat and yells: "You can't do that". "Yes you can!" hisses an elderly man from another row and a noisy chorus breaks out in the Grand Circle. Sheherazade's "magic medicine" is working.

Arabian Nights will be performed at the Olympia Theatre, from October 12th-16th.