YES, you did read that correctly. The Royal Shakespeare Company is in York, and not before time.

Ripon, Northallerton, even Goole, have been granted Royal visitations in the past, but Yorkshire’s noble capital has had to bide its time. So, even in this winter’s tale of woeful weather – and more snow is forecast for tomorrow and saturday, you have no excuse for missing this hen’s tooth of a theatre event.

Better still, although The Winter’s Tale is considered to be one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays” – even if your reviewer has lost count of those – watching Lucy Bailey’s bravura production is no problem at all.

What’s more, there has been no problem in switching it from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon to the proscenium arch design of the Grand Opera House. Two rows of stalls seats have been removed to accommodate the Morris-dancing cast, and the conversation piece of the show, a rusty ivory tower that rises to the ceiling like Jack’s beanstalk, still grows to its maximum height, albeit leaving the pained, penitent Sicilian king Leontes out of view to the Grand Circle.

The tower has lost its fairground-style spiralling shoot since Stratford but still looks like something you might find in a Terry Gilliam graphic for Monty Python. Some reviewers have said that, like children and animals, actors shouldn’t act with scenery that dominates – and indeed towers over – the stage but these actors are not for dominating in the notoriously wild, Bohemian second half. More of that later.

As realised in William Dudley's, set, costume and video design, Sicilia and Bohemia are not separate countries; instead Bohemia is up the coast, the North West English coast, somewhere like Morecambe, in the industrial Victorian England of 1860, where the local dialect is mill-town Lancashire.

You are tricked initially by the sight of Leontes’s court in fancy dress, whoozy-worse for wear and smoking on the bliss of opium pipes, slumped on plump cushions and rugs. Also “cushioned” is Tara Fitzgerald, smoky voiced in her RSC debut as queen Hermione, heavily pregnant with her second child, until Leontes (Jo Stone-Fewings) has his sudden winter of discontent, snapping that he’s “Too Hot” to a sound accompaniment not dissimilar to the shower-scene screech in Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Rivalling Othello for inexorable jealousy, brought on by his irrational conviction that Polixenes (Adam Levy), king of Bohemia, is the real father, his low blow to Hermione’s womb brings gasps from the audience.

All the while, the sea on the video backdrop is turning ever darker as storms brew to match the tragedy format of the first half, and then…maybe Shakespeare had had some of the opium, or as myth had it, he went on a pub bender and then wrote a second half of reckless comic abandon.

Not to be outdone, Bailey had already given us a giant CGI polar bear pursuing Leontes from the angry sea, but that is mere frothy frippery. The humour is of the broad variety, Pythonesque too, given northern nous and sly tomfoolery by Pearce Quigley’s Autocylus, Shakespeare’s typically lovable/irritating Fool of the piece.

Bailey still keeps the play grounded, however, leading to a moving finale of beautiful magic realism and reconciliation in which Stone-Fewings and Fitzgerald’s performances hit the heights. Look out for two impressive RSC debutantes too: Emma Noakes’s Perdita and in particular Rakie Ayola’s Paulina.

Fans of Bellowhead should note that the folk-rooted score is by Jon Boden; they will not be surprised to learn it is as thrilling, punchy and poignant as ever.

The Winter’s Tale, Royal Shakespeare Company, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday; 7.30pm nightly plus 2.30m Saturday matinee. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york