This is and isn’t quite the South African version of our own Chester miracle plays that sent even pagan critics into orbit when it came to London in 2002. The gorgeous chant and infectious dance are still there, as is the rough-theatre inventiveness and much of the exuberance. But when you love a show, as I did, you are in danger of being disappointed by its failure to deliver everything you recall. Where, for instance, is the touching moment when, playing a tune on a penny whistle, the boy Jesus performs the tiny jig his mother taught him? Where is the quietly burning humanity that Vumile Nomanyama brought to the role?

The language is a mix of Middle English, Afrikaans, Xhosa and Zulu, which seemed to me to cause problems of comprehension only in the mixed-tongue debate between Pilate and Jesus; but, with just the odd addition, the story is the same one that those Chester guildsmen performed for their fellow citizens six centuries ago.

Mostly dressed in the everyday aprons, overalls and sweatshirts of the Cape Town people they are, the actors give us plenty: angels with the halos you see in Coptic icons, a Lucifer who disappears into flames yet haunts events afterwards, a Creation with giant puppets as Adam and Eve, a Flood with a paunchy, swimsuited Noah and a comically balky Mrs Noah, and a well-staged Nativity. Here, Poseletso Sejosingoe is a sweet Mary, Simphiwe Mayeki’s Herod an African warlord with black-clad thugs slaughtering the innocents.

This brings us to a second half dominated, in Mark Dornford-May’s gender-blind revival, by Pauline Malefane’s Jesus. This magnificent-looking actress has begun as a magisterial God and now, in a striking scene, she sheds her tribal dreamcoat to reveal the plain togs of the carpenter’s son she is wearing beneath. But her Christ lacks warmth, and is far more plausible when causing principled mayhem in the temple than when raising Lazarus or saving the woman caught in adultery from what South Africans called “necklacing”, meaning a tyre shoved over the head and set alight.

Still, that touch is typical of a production that makes terrific use of pounding on oil-drums, clatter on dustbins and simple visual effects that extend to a stepladder for what is, as it should be, a painful Crucifixion. The show has, you still feel, been improvised in an impoverished township and exudes the best of its values. But is it as generous a happening as it was seven years ago? Does it end with as joyous a celebration of a togetherness that is South African yet universal? Of that I am not sure.

Box office: 0844-412 4662, to October 10

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