Spanish commander Francisco Pizarro wants to make jolly sure that a potential recruit to his expeditionary force knows what he’s in for.

“What do you think I’m offering, a walk in the country?” he snaps.

He goes on to mention that he expects to encounter black men, and snakes hanging from the branches of trees: Pizarro is off to Peru, where gold is reputed to be as common as wood.

In the event, Pizarro isn’t much troubled by snakes. Instead he is challenged and subsumed by something far more significant: a completely alien culture, dominated by Atahualpa, God-King of the Incas.

Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun was originally staged by the then-infant National Theatre in 1964 as a grand, spectacular production. Nearly 50 years later at the Playhouse, Oxford University student company Acorn Productions wisely doesn’t attempt to ape the original, but the gold-encrusted land of the Incas is still most atmospherically suggested by the sets, lighting and costumes (designers: Rachel Beaconsfield Press, Alex Dickens, Rowan Fuggle and Liam Robinson).

There is also a most effective score (musical director Will Stuart: the composer is sadly not credited in the programme), which reminded me of the huge-screen cinematic epics The Fall of the Roman Empire and El Cid. Particularly poignant are the sweeping strings and slow, measured, hammering sounds that accompany the ruthless breaking up of priceless Peruvian artefacts before they are melted down and shipped back to Spain.

If I’ve concentrated on the staging first and foremost, that’s because it’s a key component in any new production of Royal Hunt. For the awful truth is that the underlying play nowadays needs strong visual reinforcement. It comes over as expansively wordy, and also preaches at the audience with a heavy hand: what right has one country to steal another country’s property, or impose its own brand of religion? These points are endlessly hammered home, but somehow they don’t seem to relate to, say, the invasion of Iraq, or the war in Afganistan.

At the dress rehearsal I attended, it was evident that director Charlotte Beynon has done her level best to keep the storyline moving. She has secured particularly memorable performances from Jacob Taee as Pizarro, and Joe Robertson as Atahualpa: at first they are bitter enemies, then they gradually accept each other’s religions and cultures, only for Pizarro’s motley band of supporters to demand that Atahualpa be put to death. The complex, shifting nature of the relationship is brilliantly depicted.

Until Saturday. Tickets 01865 305305 (www.oxfordplayhouse.com).