Originally staged in 1996 at London's National Theatre, the theatrical version of Leo Tolstoy's classic doorstop tome of a novel, War and Peace, has been lovingly refreshed and resurrected for the touring production, which hit the Oxford Playhouse last week.

It came in two sections, together lasting more than five hours. The play begins with a modern-day tourist exploring a decrepit art museum. He asks an attendant about some paintings, and the action suddenly shifts back 200 years to the early 19th century.

It's the time of the Napoleonic Wars, and the tourist metamorphoses into a belligerent party guest, who shocks his fellow revellers by admitting his admiration for Napoleon, whose army is moving ever closer to Russian soil. It gets his friends and his social peers talking, opening up multiple storylines involving marriage, death, love, sex, separation, Freemasonry, war and peace.

Inevitably, there is a high degree of expectation for such a production, adapting, as it does, one of the greatest (in both quality and length) novels ever written. The company behind it, Shared Experience, are ambitious. They play more than 70 characters between them, including people of different races, sexes and age groups from the actors that take on the parts. Combined with the confines of a provincial town's stage, limited scenery and its relatively compact running time for such voluminous source material, it's truly remarkable.

The thing that most impresses is how absorbed I felt in that action. It is presented very cleverly by adapter Helen Edmundson; there is a lot of dialogue, but all the scenes are fairly short, and served up as concentrated nuggets of character development and story. It's an economical process, but one that is ultimately rewarding, as it creates this grand sweep and scope, while still retaining detail and focus. The experience is broken up with song, dance, music, action sequences and sometimes some more abstract material. The multiple characters and plot threads do inevitably get quite confusing at points, but the whole thing is done with such breathless conviction that one doesn't really care.

The acting and direction (Nancy Meckler and Polly Teale) is very generous, and the actors really appear as if they are both completely comfortable with both themselves and the material, and no performance overshadows any other. It was hard work to sit through almost six hours of theatre on one day, but it was one of the most rewarding theatrical experiences I have ever had.