LE Grand Depart and a heightened appreciation of all things cycling or French have permeated York's arts diary amid the euphoric rush of the Tour de France.

The HandleBards arrived in the immediate aftermath of yellow fever; four men, four bikes, two plays and a 2,000-mile cycling tour of their own, travelling from "London to London", via Yorkshire, Scotland, Holland, Belgium and elsewhere with The Comedy Or Errors and Macbeth.

Each were to be staged by Callum Brodie, Callum Cheadle, Tom Dixon and Paul Moss as "indie folk romps", not the first description that springs to mind when contemplating Macbeth. Nevertheless, like regular York visitors Oddsocks, the HandleBards can find mirth and physical comedy in much more than the Porter's drunken comic interlude.

Dressed not dissimilarly to the much-mocked Scottish official dress code for this summer's Commonwealth Games, the ecologically aware HandleBards quartet make use of all their travelling inventory: tents, upturned bikes, tartan rugs, mess tins and, best of all, bicycle pumps for swords.

Bicycle bells on fingers are rung to signify each speedy change of character; Banquo's ghost is a scrap of material on a fishing rod; Lady Macbeth is signified by a couple of shuttlecocks on a tyre tube.

The playing is broad, sometimes comic-book and has all the exuberant energy surge of a packet of Haribo, as the Scottish play becomes the skittish play. Darkness and menace are sacrificed; Macbeth's monologues need less "business" around them, but the HandleBards' Macbeth hits the damned spot as picnic theatre with panache.

Agelink Theatre Inc had travelled even further than the HandleBards, arriving in York from Australia to recount a French-English wartime romance to mark both Le Tour's entente cordiale and the 70th anniversary of the Free French Air Force at Elvington Airfield.

Writer-director Jenny Davis drew on 2,000 letters from French airman Cis (Mark Desebrock) to a tentative young Englishwoman Barbara (Jo Morris) – as well as Barbara's diary – for a beautifully observed love story to the accompaniment of Nikki D'Agostino's accordion and Alinta Carroll's nostalgic singing.

The Tour went by in a blur; Cis And Barbiche was the opposite, all the better for its sense of yearning.