After runs in Stratford and on last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Filter’s anarchic take on Shakespeare’s melancholic comedy blows like a blast of revivifying air into London on its English and European tour. This is Shakespeare deconstructed and reconstructed in a topsy-turvy, beguiling fashion, presented with the company’s hallmark electronic soundscapes and dynamic physicality. The results can be self-indulgent and the show, directed by Sean Holmes, feels rather too pleased with itself. But it’s fresh, fast and very funny.

Illyria is an unadorned stage awash with cables and equipment. The actors wear modern dress – all, that is, but Oliver Dimsdale’s shambling, drunken, doublet-and-hose-clad Toby Belch, who ambles in like a dipsomaniac refugee from a more traditional Shakespearean production who took a wrong turn coming out of his dressing room. The music of which Jonathan Broadbent’s vain, faintly pretentious Orsino demands “excess” is angry jazz, later replaced by eerie fairground tunes and noisy rock.

Viola, played with quiet intensity by Poppy Miller, borrows a jacket and hat from male audience members to create her boy’s disguise, finishing off the look by popping her own balled socks down the crotch of her trousers. Viola’s suppressed grief contrasts vividly with the late-night partying at Olivia’s house, led by Dimsdale’s Belch and Broadbent doubling as a rather sweetly befuddled Aguecheek. Maudlin, booze-soaked maundering that turns into a raucous singsong, tequila shots, a pizza delivery – spectators are vigorously encouraged to partake in all of it.

There’s substance even amid the riotous silliness. The humiliation of Ferdy Roberts’s Malvolio has real bite, and when Roberts swears to be revenged you feel he means it. And with Miller playing both Viola and her lost brother Sebastian, the final moments in which she embraces each twin’s respective lover are cleverly suggestive of sexual and emotional complications to come.

At times you feel the loss of Shakespeare’s poetry, but the company give the play a frenetic modern rhythm and a pungent flavour of love’s timeless vicissitudes. Chaotic, creative and zinging with vibrant irreverence.

Box office: 020-7328 1000, to Sept 26, then touring to Nov 7. www.filtertheatre.com

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