WE shall leave the sex to the Sunday night costume romp, Rome, which ends its hot-and-horny run this weekend. The violence that splatters the screen in the BBC2 series can be found in The Ruthless Romans too, albeit in more comic-book form with deliberately exaggerated sound effects.

After last summer's Vile Victorians and Terrible Tudors, Birmingham Stage Company has returned to York with two more John-Paul Cherrington stage adaptations of Terry Deary's alternative history books for children, wherein he delights in the horrible, gory, cruel deeds that teachers leave out.

From the empire that gave us straight roads comes the straight story-telling of Vito's Voyages, a Roman tour guide (Mehdi Rezvan) who spins heroic tales of the remarkable Romans. The pucker, ever-so-English explorer Storey (Ciaran McConville) and his dim-witted sidekick Bill (Abi Rahman) want to tell a different history, one of remarkably ruthless Romans and terrible truths, and so begins the thrust and counter thrust of this gleefully gruesome, combative but always educational entertainment.

No Roman reputation remains unsullied, from the twin-murdering Romulus to the over-confident Julius Caesar, and history is not so much bunk as de-bunked by the fast-moving, playful cast in sandals.

Alison Fitzjohn proves a splendid female foil to all the misbehaving men around her, particularly when she lifts the laughter level of the flagging first half with her mimicry of The Weakest Link's Anne Robinson in The Weirdest King - a bad boss play-off between Tiberius, Caligula (whose name means Little Boots) and Nero.

Jacqueline Trousdale's screen illustrations come into their own in the much livelier second half when the young audience is issued with 3-D Boggle Vision glasses to duck and dive to avoid arrows, pigeons, rocks and even a crocodile's snap. However, as battling Britons battle with difficult names - Rahman's Caractacus, Fitzjohn's Boudicca - and even more difficult Romans, the show does miss one trick.

Given York's Roman history, there is room to improvise more than a mere name check for a city still haunted by centurion ghosts.


Performances: The Ruthless Romans, Friday, 7pm, Saturday, 2.30pm; The Awful Egyptians, today, 10am, Saturday, 7pm. Box office: 0870 606 3595.