THE Tour de France’s Grand Départ may have come and gone from York in a flash, but more Frenchmen are soon to hurry their way through the city streets and this time they will be hanging around for rather longer.

From Wednesday, street theatre specialists ReStage and Nightshade Productions are to present Justin Stathers’ adaptation of Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers as D’Artagnan pursues his quest to join the King’s Musketeers and becomes immersed in a 17th century French world of intrigue, duels, honour and treachery.

“Justin is a friend of mine from our days at the University of York, where he was studying on the writing, directing and performance course,” says Nightshade artistic director Damian Freddi.

“He always wanted to do a Musketeers show, having been a fan since his childhood – he even spent his university days dressed as a musketeer – and I’ve wanted to do this show ever since I started Nightshade four years ago.”

ReStage director Chris Green has adapted Stathers’ script for the demands of promenade theatre, which requires a broader, snappier form of presentation. “For the outdoors, when you’re on the move, you have to cut out the exposition and cut down on the number of characters,” he says.

“We go for the ‘show, not tell’ approach,” says Damian.

“You lose subtlety this way, but we’re innovative in being able to put in the current theatre trends, such as ‘immersive theatre’ with the audience in the middle of it all,” says Chris. “We have three scenes where there’s more than one person talking at once, as would be the case in a ballroom.”

“So we’ll have one conversation going on in one corner and another conversation in another and the lead actors all running around like loons,” says Damian.

The villain of the piece, or the bête noire, to be more French about it, is being made “more appealing than usual” in Chris’s version. “Richelieu gets a lot of bad press as this glowering presence in the window, when in fact he was a very astute politician and was completely absorbed in doing things for the good of France,” he says. “He was not an ideologue but worried about the religious side of the Huguenots, and the framework that we’ve given our production is that he’s writing his memoirs of those times, dictating his thoughts to his private secretary, and we see them being re-enacted. He still comes across as a plotter, but he’s relishing that plot in our play.”

“He is the hero that Paris needs, rather than the hero that Paris wants, to paraphrase what Christopher Nolan said in one of the Batman movies,” says Damian.

To help keep the show and the story on the move, supporting characters will be playing the French press at various points, giving out news sheets hot off the presses. “If audience members have missed a conversation, it keeps them up to date,” says Chris.

“It also gives them something to read as they walk around between scenes,” says Damian, who promises chorus interludes too and maybe a reference to Le Grand Départ in Damian’s role as the King.

“I’m going to say that the Tour de France did not start when everyone thought it did! So there’s a certain amount of alternative history going on, although from my point of view it’s authentic!”

Sword-fighting will be a key component of the performance. “Fencing master Donald Walker has been choreographing the show for us, as well as teaching the cast the art of sword fighting with basket hilt rapiers for three weeks before work began on individual scenes. “Some of it now looks like Basil Rathbone versus Errol Flynn,” says Damian.

He will be joined in the cast by Jimmy Johnson’s D’Artagnan, Richard Bevan’s Athos, James Witchwood’s Porthos, Ben Sawyer’s Aramis and Lee Gemmell’s Richelieu.

“Lee’s got the scheming down to a fine art,” says Damian. “His audition was a Richard Nixon speech fromFrost/ Nixon and he really stood out.”

“He has this stage presence and when you combine that with a man of subtle intelligence, as Richelieu was, his Richelieu could come across as Rasputin, if a little more polite,” says Chris.

Audiences can expect a pacy show full of action. “Promenade theatre suits Dumas’s story to the T because pretty much everything in it involves saying, ‘Let’s go and do this’,” says Damian.

They may be French, but the Musketeers are as popular as ever in Britain, whether on the BBC’s television series The Musketeers or in theatre adaptations. “That’s because we like an underdog story: three against the entire Cardinal’s Guard,” says Damian.

“It’s heroes against the establishment ,” says Chris. “These men are daring to do what they do, threatening the whole state, which is why Richelieu doesn’t like them.”

“There’s something very appealing about the spirit of adventure that comes out in the Musketeers; it has that feeling of wild abandon; very much like the appeal of pirates,” says Damian.

“It’s the tale of the maverick outsider who succeeds against all the odds,” concludes Chris. “That’s something we all aspire to but usually never get the chance to do.”

ReStage and Nightshade Productions present The Three Musketeers in promenade performances, meeting at St Crux Parish Hall, Pavement, York, at 7pm; July 23 to 27; July 30 to August 3; August 6 to 10. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk or on the door