Making merry with the past is a popular theatrical tradition profitably exploited over the years by the likes of the Monty Python team, the Birmingham Stage Company with their Horrible Histories and the National Theatre of Brent (remember their two-person Charge of the Light Brigade?.

Newer to the ranks — but every bit as expert — are Temple Theatre, built around a trio of friends who met at Oxford early in the new millennium and established a permanent company in 2008 with a fourth (Danish) member in Troels Hagen Findsen.

Last Wednesday, they visited Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum with a new show tailored to tie in with the amazing Heracles to Alexander the Great exhibition which continues there until the end of the month. Performed in the atrium at the heart of this magnificent building — among ancient statues and with the capacity audience ranged on two sides — Unmythable took us on an entertaining journey through the classical world and its myths.

The hour-long production —directed by Mike Tweddle — was fashioned around the adventures of Jason (Paul O’Mahony) and two of his principal lieutenants aboard the Argo, played by Richard Darbourne and the aforementioned Mr Findsen. We, the audience, made up the rest of the crew, encouraged to wave our arms enthusiastically — and I hope heroically — whenever the Argonauts were mentioned.

Though hardly original (what in the realms of comedy ever is?) the view from the ‘other ranks’ of various notable exploits still raised a smile. “Have you ever seen one of your friends being eaten?” asks a temple building worker (as he now is) looking back on his part in Odysseus’s encounter with Polyphemus and his fellow Cyclopes.

I also enjoyed the transformation of Jason’s wife-to-be Medea (Richard Darbourne) into a tough-cookie Liverpudlian and her father King Aeëtes of Colchis (Mr Findsen) into a prototype American gangster.

Unmythable this certainly was. How sad for those who mythed it. Let’s hope for a return visit soon.