We all love a story at Christmas – that of the Nativity perhaps more than any other. At Stratford this year, however, festive fun is being supplied by tales even older, and inspired by different religions and culture. These are the stories – some thrilling, some comic, some instructive – known from their first appearance in the West in the 18th century as The Thousand and One Nights or, more simply, the Arabian Nights.

Their translation from page to stage is brilliantly achieved by the Royal Shakespeare Company in a gripping and colourful ensemble production under director Dominic Cooke. The two-and-a-half- hour show is built on an adaptation of the stories that Mr Cooke produced 11 years ago for the Young Vic. Oxford audiences will probably remember it from Creation Theatre Company’s Christmas offering three years ago.

With so many stories in the collection – if not 1,001, then certainly hundreds – there can be no attempt to present more than a tiny fraction of them. In fact, we get just six – four before the interval, and two after.

Properly in place, I am glad to say, is the framing device that places the tales in context. All purport to be told by the vizier’s daughter Shahrazad (Ayesha Dharker, pert and charming), who marries the king (a properly majestic Silas Carson), despite his vow to kill a wife a day in revenge for his first spouse’s infidelity. Her plan is to save her neck by keeping him on tenterhooks over the outcome of a story or by enticing him with the prospect of others to come.

A better start could hardly be imagined than Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, in which the savvy slave girl Marjanah (Adura Onashile, pictured above) outwits the thieves’ captain (Daniel Cerqueira, left) and saves the life – and fortune – of her master Ali (Amit Shah, centre).

Music and dance play their part here as they do elsewhere in this imaginative, multi-faceted show. Ingenuity is nowhere better seen than in the familiar story of Sinbad the sailor and his travels, which is superbly told through the use of puppets.

Simon Trinder, the supplier of so much recent drollery at Stratford, comes into his own as the loose-limbed ‘corpse’, as he appears, of The Little Beggar, subjected to all manner of indignities by a succession of people who believe, wrongly, that they have accidentally killed him.

Fun though this was, the biggest laughs came later – certainly from all the youngsters around me in the stalls – with How Abu Hassan Broke Wind. ‘How’ he broke wind – as Chris Ryman showed in a shirt-raising demonstration – was both at great length and very loudly. We loved it!

Until January 30. Tel: 0844 800 1110 (www.rsc.org.uk).