It feels as if the Open Air theatre has rotated unadventurous productions of five Shakespeare comedies for about 200 rainy summers, though I suppose it might be a little less. That unalluring tradition has been excitingly broken with Timothy Sheader’s arrival as the first young artistic director in the company’s history. Sheader’s Fifties Mafia-country production of Romeo And Juliet, with a hint of Fellini’s Dolce Vita and a shocking, up-to-the-moment knife-fight that leaves Mercutio and Tybalt gushing blood, is stamped with invention, surprise and imagination.

Such qualities lend this Romeo unusual potency. The masquerade ball, with costumes colour-coded in black and white to emphasise the blood and death themes, goes with a rare swing — Oscar Pearce’s eye-catching, gayish Mercutio, born to mockery, and Ben Joiner’s thuggish Tybalt dance together in sullen menace. Tim Woodward’s snarling Mafioso Capulet subjects Juliet to violent abuse, while Annette McLaughlin’s stylish, leggy Lady Capulet, a cross between Rita Hayworth and Lauren Bacall, shoots hot glances at her nephew Tybalt.

There are, it’s true, limitations in terms of concept and performance. There’s no sense of hot, sultry Verona even on a warm London night. Robert Innes Hopkins’s unfunctional design, a neo-classical ruin supported by wooden scaffolding, with yawning gaps in its brickwork and without windows or cornices, reeks of meaningless dilapidation.

Fights between Montagues and Capulets sometimes resemble pretty dancing displays, with musical accompaniment bizarrely jovial. Sheader has looked for genuine teenagers as the doomed lovers but although Nicholas Shaw’s schoolboyish Romeo and Laura Donnelly’s sweet Juliet, who adores Claire Benedict’s typical scold of a nurse, look the parts, they do not act them, remaining polite strangers to passion, suffering and emotion. They take sexual desire and that long goodnight on the balcony in their unsmitten stride, which is no Shakespearian way to take Eros’s first flush. But in a dash of final irony, typical of Sheader’s stagecraft, Juliet begins to wake from drugged sleep, just as the unseeing Romeo consumes the deathly poison.

Until 2 August (0844 826 4242)