"Excitement in Town" proclaimed the banner at the entrance when you'd found it after braving the ring road and the normally strictly-guarded BMW gates. It actually meant the glittering silver model of the new Mini, enticingly on show before going into production.

It could equally have stood for Creation Theatre's latest 'site-specific' venture, not the greensward, chimes and riverscape of their summer venue at Magdalen College School, but the caverns and clangour of high-tech industry, in this case BMW's panel store. There was certainly a buzz as we took our seats after first finding ourselves guests at Gertrude and Claudius's grey-toppered wedding in the marquee, aka BMW's pattern shop.

A scene from the play

In the event this was a typical Creation evening, fast-paced, youthful and innovative, and even including those essential rugs for our knees! It's a pared-down Hamlet, with only eight actors, cutting out politics and foreign affairs, focusing entirely on the dysfunctional Hamlet clan, especially its intense pale young Prince played by Damian Davis as by second nature.

Sometimes director Zoe Seaton over-indulged the setting, ideal though it is for palace secrets and eavesdropping. Which catwalk, ladder, gantry or mesh cage would they clatter up and over next? There was the transport too. Polonius (Dawson Peters making a welcome return) arrives in a golf-buggy, the royal pair in a top-of-the-range BMW, a Coventry forklift trundles Ophelia's grave; Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern's unreliable tandem and the Players' humble cart are obviously for proles only.

R and G are perhaps too twittish (a reflection on the admission system at Wittenberg?) quite out of their sycophantic depth. David Martin, in college scarf, is an excellent young Horatio, scared witless by the Ghost, an unseen breathed presence suggested by spooky echoes and lighting.

It's a production of extremes, perhaps a function of Davis's inexhaustible energy. Hamlet's 'madness', sometimes jumpy and witty, as in his teasing Polonius while reading the Vauxhall Cavalier Manual (!), can lead to unusual violence with Ophelia (Rachel Jane Allen, flung into one of those cages) and Gertrude (Marie McCarthy).

His advice to the players is a connoisseur's item: he prates his amateur tips utterly ignored by the pros busy with their limbering-up exercises. The final duel is protracted, with quarterstaffs, then crowbars, hubcaps and spades, at last the poisoned sword, before death claims all. The family has destroyed itself. But what of Denmark? I shall never quite accept Fortinbras as a disposable extra, but this really is excitement in town until March 10.