Mad king meets Mad Max in Oxford Theatre Guild’s post-apocalyptic take on Shakespeare’s great tragedy.

Painted faces, shaved heads and rustic furs and feathers in the costumes suggest a society far removed from our own and, indeed, any conceived of by the playwright.

While it is understandable that director Alistair Nunn should offer his own slant on the drama, I can’t pretend the conceit really added anything for me, except perhaps in the jarring industrial sound used to suggest Lear’s inner turmoil. The action begins with a brief invented prologue in which Cordelia’s twin brother dies in babyhood, thereby supplying a motive for the king’s preference for her over elder sisters Goneril and Regan (effective studies in malice by Cate Nunn and Danielle Beesley). All this alters of, course, at Lear’s fatal division of his kingdom when Cordelia’s inability to supply a fawning eulogy means she gets nothing.

As presented in tough-cookie mode by Eve Winterbottom, she comes across as an oddly unsympathetic heroine, traditional only in her voice that is “ever soft”. So soft that on opening night it was sometimes in unequal battle with the biting wind sweeping across Merton’s lovely gardens. Her once-doting dad is just as unconventionally portrayed, Joseph Kenneway’s strapping Lear being some way removed from the “poor, weak, infirm old man” of his own description.

Goneril and Regan, busily trimming Lear’s retinue, join together to ask “What need one?” before going off into hysterical laughter with the odious Cornwall (Jeremy Newton).

The blinding of poor Gloucester (Edward Tomlin) is well managed, as is the fight to the death of his sons, baddie Edmund (Simon Marie) and goodie Edgar (Robert Cole, surely as cold, clad only in underpants, as his character must have been on the blasted heath).

An exceptionally well-spoken Fool (Josh Hall) is another compelling feature of the production, on till July 18.