Weighty intellectual discourse, ribald humour and passionate romance: all come together beautifully in Howard Brenton’s reimagining of the 12th-century historical love story of Abelard and Heloise, such a success in John Dove’s production last year that the Globe is reviving it this season.

The fervent spiritual and fleshly connection of Oliver Boot and Sally Bretton as the lovers is wildly, irresistibly sexy. But no less involving is their clash with Bernard of Clairvaux (Jack Laskey), the Cistercian abbot who sees their espousal of the theories of Aristotle and Plato as highly dangerous. A thrilling debate ensues, in which fundamentalism is pitched against rationality and the true meanings of love and faith are reconsidered.

Dove’s production and Brenton’s writing swing between the shamelessly broad and the intricate, and anywhere else they might at times look crude. On a warm night at the Globe, under an open sky, the treatment seems perfectly apt: cheeky, robust, yet tough-minded too.

Nor is Brenton’s argument predictably stacked. The inflexible belief system of Laskey’s cadaverous Bernard, so full of zeal that he vomits it up, choking on the tongues he practically talks in, allows for a sense of mystery and wonderment that is emphatically human. Yet when, according to Christian doctrine, God is Love, the urgent, ardent couplings of Abelard and Heloise begin to assume an elevating, almost devotional quality. In one scene a nun spies on the couple as they make love on an altar. Her account of the act to two eager sisters may be touched by prurience, but their response is one of awe.

Meanwhile, Abelard and Bernard are linked by a shared conceit: the former’s challenges to the Church may be hubristic; but the latter has the arrogance of a refusal to doubt his own direct line to the Almighty.

There’s much more besides, not least Heloise’s frankly modern appetite for sex and education, and her desire to choose freedom over “the chains” of wedlock and nuclear family. A lively supporting cast of courtiers, clerics and workers help Dove’s production to move fluidly and evocatively between locations, and William Lyons’s score is tinglingly melodic.

Granted, the dialogue may not always combine the contemporary and the cod-medieval entirely happily; but overall the whole balances rigour and entertainment with aplomb, resulting in a genuinely challenging piece of popular theatre.
Box office: 020-7401 9919

Editor's choice

• The End: the worst movie endings ever
• Introducing The Times Proms Podcast
• Heath Ledger tipped for Oscar