"A Midsummer Night's Dream". Oxford Playhouse

'Now, what I want is, Ideas. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Ideas. Ideas alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.'

Mr Gradgrind never said that.

But if he had, it would have been the touchstone for Holly Race-Roughan's fizzing production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is in every way the mirror image to Gradgrind's single-minded quest for Facts. This is a show which takes everything you thought you knew about Shakespeare's most magical play, turns it inside out and back to front, and still, miraculously, makes perfect sense, without ever devaluing the spirit of the original. 'Up and down, up and down, I will lead them up and down,' incants Sergo Vares' white-faced, demonic Puck again and again. He's not talking about the lovers. He's talking about us. And we don't have a chance.

There's a Dream for everyone. And this one may not have been the ideal place to start for the hordes of twelve-year-olds packing the stalls of the Oxford Playhouse on a pre-Easter outing to their first-ever Shakespeare play. I can see the letters to the headteacher now: 'Dear Miss Pumblechook, my daughter came home in tears last night asking why Theseus shot Bottom dead and why Demetrius put his willy in Helena when he didn't even like her. What are you trying to do to our children?'

Not any Dream will do. But for those of us at the other end of the scale, who've seen more Midsummer Nights than are Dreamt of in your philosophy, Headlong Theatre's radical interpretation is a kaleidoscopic dose of pure imagination. More than once I became aware of my jaw lolling on the velvet of my seat, and I left genuinely feeling like I'd just seen this play for the very first time.

Race-Roughan has an agenda of course. This reading is all about the evils of class discrimination/patriarchal domination, with Theseus a despotic psychopath and his henchman Egeus priapic at the thought of executing his own daughter. Michael Marcus, in the dual role of Theseus and Oberon (normally a case of implied connection, but here actually the same person) is frankly terrifying. In the opening scene he playfully kicks all the food and utensils off his banqueting table, freshly and meticulously prepared by the mechanicals (led by 'Executive Chef' Nick Bottom). His bride-to-be Hippolyta (Hedydd Dylan) is hiding from him under the tablecloth, and when she emerges and feigns to kiss him while attempting to stab him with a knife, he produces a revolver and holds it against her throat while reminding her, 'I wooed thee with my sword'. His judgement on Hermia (that she must either do her father's bidding be exiled to a nunnery, or 'die the death'), normally delivered with an air of patrician apology, is here full-on taunting, accompanied by a punishing head-lock. Marcus's performance is reminiscent of Malcolm McDowell's Alex from A Clockwork Orange: gleeful, unhinged and destructive. 

But while Race-Roughan's interpretation is fascinating and convincing, it's the flood of new ideas that makes this production truly unforgettable.

It starts, not with Theseus and Hippolyta discussing their wedding plans, but with Puck sitting on a table staring out at the audience in total silence, accompanied by the BSL interpreter Sarah Cox. She watches him. He watches us. Then slowly he produces a banana, peels and eats it. The message is clear: he's in charge. And we're in uncharted territory. Even the way Headlong have integrated the BSL person is fresh and new. Rather than standing at the side of the stage, Cox is one of the ensemble, a liminal presence unseen by the characters, but part of the action.

Other topsy-turvy moments include Lysander asking the sexually dominant Hermia to 'lie farther off' rather than the other way around; Demetrius having sex with Helena even while telling her to stop following him (the exploitative, bullying nature of their relationship coming shockingly to the surface); Titania continuing to be in love with the bewitched Bottom even after the 'remedy' has been applied to her eyes - because his humanity is preferable to Oberon's tyranny; Bottom growing hooves rather than ass's ears, making him a hobbled, abused innocent rather than a simple figure of fun; Demetrius getting his comeuppance by spending the rest of his life in a state of half-awake miasma (because he is the only one left in a state of enchantment); and, perhaps most shocking of all, the massacre of the mechanicals at the climax of their play by a bored Theseus, who chucks his gun at Puck to finish the job. Thankfully he stops short of executing the little Indian child who was the innocent cause of the fairy feud. But only just.

There are also some inspired interpolations from other plays. Most satisfying is to see Mercutio's Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet imported into the mouth of Bottom as he raves about his magical experience in the forest. How much more sense it makes here!

So, while in one sense this production is an exploration of the dark dangers hiding in Shakespeare's sylvan wonderland, in another it is a bravura demonstration of sheer, theatrical originality, where every element of the text is looked at with fresh, vibrant eyes.

By the end, the play's brutal undercurrents have broken its banks, and the stage is a mess of blood, dead bodies and sniggering fairies. Puck sarcastically requests our applause. These shadows certainly have offended. Let them roar again.