I’m still wondering why Kneehigh and its director, Emma Rice, have set their take on Don Giovanni in the battered Britain of 1978. Because we, too, could soon be seeing strikers huddling beside braziers, rubbish in the streets and the many other period touches that the company introduces? But that’s not an adequate explanation for a piece that’s primarily about timeless subjects: female frustration, male inadequacy – and predatory John, who exploits both.

Never mind. This is still one of Kneehigh’s more visually imaginative pieces and surely its most erotic. Gisli Orn Gardarsson is a fine John: cool, stealthy, casually contemptuous of women and men as he insolently saunters from conquest to conquest. And whether he is with Nina Dogg Filippusdottir’s Anna, who can’t unearth any passion from the vicar who is her husband, or with Patrycja Kujawska’s Zerlina, who is marrying an equally well-meaning, equally ineffectual man, the sexual gymnastics are startling and, in their balletic way, pretty graphic.

The characters’ names obviously owe much to Mozart’s opera, whose chords blaze out at climaxes, interrupting songs that stretch from rock and pop to an ironic I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas, complete with a decorated tree for John to skulk behind. But there are also differences, prime among them Anna’s father and the victim of John’s shooting. He’s a half-senile invalid but also a former general, which is why he reappears in full uniform as a grimly didactic ghost, telling John that “love is not a bottomless pit” and that “care is all there is”.

That’s a bit clunky and even pompous, but doesn’t undermine the idea embodied in the action, which is that sex can be liberating, can be diminishing. Gardarsson’s John dwindles into a bored, doped-up, partied-out wreck while his obsessed stalker, Mary Woodvine’s Elvira, is left scrabbling among the black sacks presumably left by striking dustmen. Yet Zerlina and Anna survive and thrive, though the latter marks this by leaving her husband, unable to face the future with a man almost as wet as the cups of tea that are his solution to every problem.

And Rice is adroit in her use of everything and everyone from the huge ship’s containers that open to reveal the show’s more intimate encounters to the dancers who end up jubilantly frolicking under falling balloons and over John’s corpse. Lively, inventive stuff – whether it’s set in 1978 or not.

Box office: 0844 8001110, to Jan 10

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