King Arthur, Theatre Royal, Brighton, May 17

6:00am Thursday 17th May 2007

Last year, the Armonico Consort brought us their highly inventive production of The Fairy Queen, set in a mental hospital and blending opera with dance and circus skills. This year they're transporting Purcell's King Arthur to the trenches of the First World War and director Tom Guthrie has once more found a use for his skilled aerialists.

Based on King Arthur's role in the battles between the Saxons and Britons rather then the legends of Camelot, Purcell's King Arthur was first performed in 1691 with libretto by John Dryden. It was a semi-opera, more like a play with songs, and while the music is still "extremely powerful", Dryden's text, according to Guthrie, "hasn't survived so well".

Hence this clever reinvention, which casts the mythical king "more as a true romantic idea pulsating at the heart of a nation than the Arthur of round tables" and seeks inspiration in the "magical and enchanted trenches" described by the artist and poet David Jones.

"It was so grim and terrible from any objective point of view," explains Guthrie. "David Jones was aware of this extraordinary feeling of being viscerally alive. It was so intense and real that nothing else compared to it, even though they could have died at any second.

"There was also a lot of superstition, like the Angel Of Mons. We're drawing on the poetry which came out of that intense situation in terms of people's fertile imaginations."

Here the aerialists play a mythical battalion of deserters, from all sides, descending to help the injured in battle.

"They occupy that upper space which often isn't used in theatre," says Guthrie. "It also represents a more spiritual angle, what's going on in people's minds."

• 7.30pm, £5-£22.50, 01273 709709

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