As You Like It seems like an easy option for the International Festival: simultaneously a celebration of the English language’s greatest playwright and a playful romp through relationships and innocent deceptions. This version is radical in its dramaturgy: not a single word of the source text has been changed, yet it shares the kind of theatricality more familiar from Ontroerend Goed’s forays into metadrama. Cliff Cardinal leans into the complicity that exists between audience and performer, drawing on the lessons of Brecht and even stand-up comedy. There is powerful audience participation and Shakespeare’s wry humour is transformed into a weapon: the trope of mistaken identity is pressed hard until the script becomes frighteningly contemporary and challenging.

The Shakespeare industry, so often a lazy excuse for a production that lacks imagination, is manipulated through Cardinal’s passion. The undercurrent of Shakespeare’s awareness of theatre’s artifice is subverted boldly, the lines between stage and auditorium are, as in Goed’s current Fringe show Thanks For Being Here, challenged and blurred. The questions of complicity, trust and deception are at the hearty of this production, bleeding out into audience reactions. This demands an active engagement with the material and aims to provoke vigorous debate, to the extent that even writing a review becomes an aspect of the performance and an act of moral complicity with the artist.

As You Like It: A Radical Retelling, Church Hill Theatre, until 23 August, 8pm; main picture: Dahlia Katz.