EQUIPPED with the "in-flight magazine" (alias the theatre programme) and instructed by golden-booted hostesses in the Polarity Reversal Procedure, the audience is ready for take-off.

Captain Tempest (Dan Hield), intergalactic traveller, pipe smoker of the year and unflappable Fifties man, will take us on a journey to a B-movie galaxy, a strange and crazily comical place where Shakespeare has made acquaintance with rock'n'roll for the first time.

His crew aboard the Intergalactic Starship Albatross has a habit of picking up musical instruments and reaching for microphones at every opportunity, and no one is averse to reaching for a verse or two of Shakespeare and giving it a satirical spin.

Caught in an asteroid belt, they are forced to land on Planet D'Illyria, home to mad scientist Dr Prospero and his mind-expanding drug experiments. With the doc are his beauteous, pretty-in-pink daughter, Miranda (Nicki Fox), and a roller-skating, ever-logical robot, Ariel (Nick Holbek).

Captain and crew alike are shaken and stirred: ship's cook Cookie (Callum O'Connell) has the hots for Miranda and she has the even hotters for the Captain. Dastardly Prospero is behaving oddly, but the ship's new Science Officer (saxophone playing Juliet Waters) is acting stranger still. What can it all mean?

A good time for the audience, that's what. Bob Carlton's mad musical marriage of Shakespeare's The Tempest and the B-movie, Forbidden Planet, is conducted at a lively lick by director Craig Barley and musical director Adam Tomlinson, whose arrangements fizz like sherbet in the mouth. The cast, nevertheless, has to work hard to energise the quiet first night audience, and indeed there is room for more interaction. Earlier encouragement to join in would not go amiss.

However, there is plenty of musical magic dust amid the monster smashes of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, not least the ensemble singing of Good Vibrations; Nicki Fox's pop starlet rendition of Why Must I Be A Teenager In Love; and Jean-Pierre Bolet's guitar solo in She's Not There.

Box office: 01904 760682/623568

Updated: 10:44 Tuesday, September 14, 2004