A dreary monochrome drizzle was being enlivened by the colourful academic gowns of a degree day ceremony as I passed the Sheldonian on the way to Oxford Shakespeare Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The sight was an ideal curtain-raiser, for director Gemma Fairlie has chosen to set this, OSC’s tenth birthday production, in the world of present day Oxford academia. So chav-dressed Hermia (Rachael Henley) faces an alarming choice between Demetrius (Alexander McWilliam, stiffly attired in evening dress ready for the college ball), and her real love Lysander (Andrew Venning), who sports scruffy boots, long hair, and a Pink Floyd T-shirt. Her father Theseus (Antony Jardine), a bombastic don and college head, makes it very plain that Lysander does not meet with his approval. Things get even more complicated when Helena (Rebecca Naylor) bursts upon the scene: an earnest, bespectacled research student, she can’t wait to get her claws into a man.

Meanwhile, the college servants are preparing for Theseus’s own marriage to Hippolyta (Helen Bang). A play is to be staged for the newlyweds, and in charge is nervy, bowler-hatted, head porter Quince (Antony Jardine, doubling up), while head gardener Bottom (Mark Pearce) does all the grunt work. It is soon hilariously apparent that the planned performance will be an unmitigated shambles.

Director Fairlie’s Oxford concept grafts seamlessly onto Shakespeare’s parallel fairy world, aided by Nick Lloyd Webber and James D Reid’s score — they use western-style music to back the human scenes, and switch to more eastern-orientated sounds for the fairies.

Fairlie plainly thinks that there are differences between humans and fairies, but there are similarities too: in a production that doesn’t shirk the robust sexual side of the play, Titania, Queen of the Fairies (Helen Bang), stares very pointedly at Bottom’s crotch the minute she first encounters him. In the wholly human world, the confrontation between Demetrius and Lysander looks more like a homoerotic wrestling match than a potential duel — this was the one scene that didn’t quite ring true to me.

The eight-strong cast is completed by Hiran Abeysekera, an actor born to play Puck — he has wonderfully mischievous eye contact with the audience, and flits the very considerable distances up and down the garden at superhuman speed.

Uniformly excellent ensemble acting and immaculate diction result in several scenes being superbly played as high farce. Altogether this is a Dream to warm the cockles of your heart — even if your outside feels damp and chilly.

Until August 26. 01865 766266 (www.creationtheatre.co.uk).