More than two decades have passed since Peter Brook's seminal, nine-hour staging of the epic, ancient Hindu text Mahabharata and no one has dared take on the sheer magnitude of it since.

"It's such an extraordinary story with such dramatic potential," says director Stuart Wood. "Myself and writer Stephen Clark both agreed it was time it was looked at in a completely different way."

Where Brook's production was straight theatre, this ambitious and colourful version is a stunning fusion of traditional Indian dance, contemporary music and visual magic.

"It's a total theatre experience," says Wood. "The germ for the style of the piece was taken from the idea: what is the currency of Indian performing arts? Dance and music. To capture that essence not in a pastiche, but in an authentic way, we seized the classical dance form of Kathak and used that as our signature style"

With its philosophical depth and volume (Mahabharata is seven times the size of the Bible), myriad relationships, stories and events, condensing it into three hours must have been a mammoth task.

So how did Wood and his collaborators, including composer Nitin Sawhney, choreographer Gauri Sharma Tripathi, and Stephen Clark, approach it?

"It was daunting," says Wood, "but I was deeply enthusiastic about it. I began by reading the cheat's version and gradually progressed. It's a work of duty and devotion just reading it. It's more than simply a story of kings and princes, gods and godesses, myths and mortals. Every part of the Hindu philosophy and teaching is contained within it."

To make it manageable, it was decided early on to focus on the journey of one woman, Draupadi, who defies her destiny to become wife to five brothers and the catalyst for the world's most terrible war.

Throughout the production, Wood draws on the theatrical language of objects such as pots and fabrics to create themes, moods and sometimes characters: "It's a sort of magic really, you can conjure up a sense of transformation."

Wood's own feelings about the production are wholly positive. He describes one dance between two Indian dancer, auditioned in and brought over from Calcutta, as a "sublime display of Kathak," and says the process as a whole has been "a remarkable and fulfilling journey".

Yet since its world premiere at Sadler's Wells in April, the critics have been less than generous. There have been accusations of a lack of clarity and Stephen Clark's language and rhyming couplets have been dismissed as "sub-Lloyd Webber" (The Guardian).

All the critics seem to agree, however, that Angela Davies's set, with its vivid tints of Indian light and billowing fabric, is beautiful, and Nitin Sawhney and Gauri Sharma Tripathi have been praised for their creation of a compelling, contemporary Kathak dance-theatre.

In the show's defence, Wood says: "We opened cold at Sadler's Wells. Our press night was a dress rehearsal. We realised we needed to make some changes and modifications. It's about your own feedback, not just that of the critics. You just never know it works until you actually see it."

Subsequently, some of the show has been edited and made clearer and some of the dance sequences have been developed.

Jane McMorrow, Brighton Festival producer and theatre programmer, says: "It's really fitting that this sumptuous, epic story is being unveiled in the glorious setting of Theatre Royal Brighton, which has such a great sense of style and the versatility to stage this ambitious dynamic production.

"When you're integrating music, dance, dialogue and puppetry in a show of this scale it can take a while for all of those elements to mesh together. But by the time Mahabharata arrives in Brighton, it'll be gelling beautifully. Our audiences will be lucky enough to see it at its best."

  • until Sat, 7.45pm (Thurs and Sat mats 2.30pm), £16-£23, 01273 709709