IF you enjoyed the rich and fruity cake of Tim Luscombe's grandiose yet intensely intimate production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus last summer, then rejoice at his return to the Theatre Royal.

This time Luscombe is pulling all the strings, not only directing but also adapting Northanger Abbey, the 1803 work of the first great modern English novelist, Jane Austen.

Artistic director Damien Cruden gave Luscombe an open playing field for an adaptation and he picked Northanger Abbey because "the story is such high melodrama with a gothic element to it that is innately theatrical". The book, he says, is the most stage-worthy of all her works, being full of characters that have real, rollicking emotional journeys.

Note that word "rollicking". It is exactly the style of Luscombe's effervescent account of Catherine Morland's journey to womanhood on board an overactive imagination, fuelled with a zest for life amid the sophisticated society of Bath. One fellow critic reached for the words OTT and camp at half time, but did so with such a smile on her face that it was apparent the effervescence had permeated.

Luscombe has made brilliant directorial decisions, not only in choosing himself to write the adaptation, but in his choice of cast, designer and two-for-the-price-of-one musical director and choreographer for a comedy of manners that is brisk and crisply witty as Oscar Wilde and romantic too - and thankfully eschews the encumbrance of a narrator.

Designer Mark Bailey - responsible for the 1996 York Mystery Plays design at the Theatre Royal - has created a gently raked wooden set that first evokes the grandeur of Bath and yet hints at farce too, with its giant doors. Up pops Olivia Darnley's ringlet-tumbling, flighty Isabella Thorpe to read from Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries Of Udolpho, the book that drives the wild imagination of Jenni Maitland's impressionable, whirling Catherine.

Into society they go, encountering Susan Bovell's marvellously caustic Mrs Allen, Morgan George's strutting, predatory John Thorpe, Mark Payton's cussed General Tilney and Freddie Stevenson's charming curate Henry Tilney (a Colin Firth character without the haughty front).

Luscombe gives us not only divinely witty dialogue and instinctive characterisation but Bath carriages and a superb use of Matthew Bugg's music and stately choreography (which features a host of extras as the public). Designer Bailey pulls a rabbit out of the hat in the transformation from elegant Bath to gothic Northanger Abbey, and his costumes are exquisite.

Scene changes are a picture too, be it the cast moving chairs or a clever use of a green rug to suggest grass in the most delightful of cliff-top picnics.

Here is an Austen production that puts the bubble into Bath. Do please luxuriate in the deeply pleasurable yet hyper activities of this fruity fancy.

Northanger Abbey, York Theatre Royal, until June 12. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 11:33 Thursday, May 27, 2004