Sherlock Holmes's best-known adventure is given a treatment like you've never seen before in the new version of The Hound of the Baskervilles at the Oxford Playhouse this week.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's great Victorian sleuth does, it is true, strut the stage in his trademark deerstalker hat, puffing at a huge meerschaum pipe. You'll also hear (but not see) the famous violin in action.

But, these few links with tradition apart, there is very little here that a Holmes 'purist' would identify with the genius of 221B Baker Street. Why, he even speaks with a foreign accent.

It is typical of the hilariously irreverent Peepolykus theatre company that they should choose to cast their only Spanish member, Javier Marzan, as the detective. It shows, from the start, a healthy contempt for convention that Holmes himself might have respected.

But there is nothing offensive, or mickey-taking, in their approach. They tackle the story in what Dame Edna Everage would call a very caring way.

The result is nothing less than a hoot, and the show will doubtless win many new admirers for Peepolykus, which has long had a big fan base in Oxford.

Their early shows were developed at the Pegasus Theatre, in Magdalen Road, and it is good to see the 10-year-old company repaying its dues this week with an exit collection in support of the ambitious rebuilding project there.

The name, incidentally, is pronounced people-like-us - which, increasingly, is proving to be true.

Their style of humour is perhaps best compared to that of Morecambe and Wise in one of those plays "wot Ern wrote".

The essential ingredient is the 'dual existence', as you might call it, of the three actors on the stage. They play a bewildering assortment of more than 30 characters, in a way that demands some very skilful (and very funny) high-speed costume changes choreographed by director Orla O'Loughlin. But they do so without ever letting us forget that they are also John Nicholson, Jason Thorpe and the aforementioned Javier Marzan - who are likely at any moment to re-emerge as their 'true' selves. They do so to splendid effect at the beginning of the second half, when Senor Marzan affects to be outraged by a complaint from members of the audience that we "can't understand the Dago".

To 'punish' them, he insists that the company stage the whole of the first half again, in fast-forward.

Thus we gain a high-speed reprise of the sudden death of Sir Charles Baskerville, his worried nephew's visit to Baker Street, and all that follows as Holmes and Watson (Mr Nicholson) join him in his spooky mansion on a bleak Devon moor to try to save him from a similar fate.

It's on until tomorrow - don't miss it.