What a refreshing change it proves to have actors replaced by puppets for an evening. The Royal Shakespeare Company scored a direct hit with Gregory Doran's puppet-driven version of Shakespeare's erotic narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, in 2004.

Doran's hour-long, finely tuned production, revived for The Complete Works Festival in this ravishing theatre, once more discovers a way of translating an Elizabethan mythic-fantasy into a puppetry form that is accessible, amusing and eloquent.

Doran's vision of Venus wafting down in a chariot driven by silver doves may have been borrowed from Elizabethan masques, but his practical inspiration was Japan's bunraku puppet theatre. Its "ningyo dolls" or puppets, roughly half human size, are operated by five terrific puppeteers on stage. A narrator, Harriet Walter, sits stage right, a guitarist stage left.

Designer Robert Jones's proscenium stage, from whose frame the gaunt gold skull of Death stretches out elongated, skeletal hands at the astonishing deathly climax, offers a hazy, rural perspective. These cross-cultural arrangements work in harmony and impart an enchanting strangeness to the evening.

Venus and Adonis describes in terms amusing and tragic-pathetic the scarcely requited longings of the Goddess for the beautiful youth who remains unwilling to give his all, or even a quarter of it.

I realised puppet-play could marry the suggestive and salacious, but not how expressive puppet gestures and movement could be, whether of goddess, human or animal.

The wild boar puppet that kills Adonis struts on stage, its face reeking of evil and violence. Venus, more or less mounting the passive Adonis, head plunging between his legs, then darting kisses all over him, as his limbs flail like the limbs of a disturbed spider, becomes the model of the predatory female in pursuit of her object of obsessive desire.

Two puppet horses, half real-life size, wholly life-like and intent upon rutting-bliss, send shafts of irony in the direction of the reluctant Adonis and a Venus whose agonies and unfulfilled ecstasies are voiced by Miss Walter in slightly precious style.

• Until 21 April (020 7226 1787).