The lovely gardens of Lady Margaret Hall, bathed in golden evening light if you’re lucky (as I was), supply an altogether magical setting for Creation Theatre’s superb production of As You Like It.

Nor is this simply one to be admired as a background to the evergreen love story, which one Shakespearean scholar has brightly summarised as “four weddings and no funeral”.

Rather it is to be experienced close-up and in varied detail as audiences journey through leafy bowers and beside the sun-dappled waters of the Cherwell in pursuit of the players.

For this is a promenade production, a style of theatrical entertainment that often disappoints in execution – tedious trailing around to no purpose – but which here lends a valuable extra dimension to the show. The audience’s journey begins even before the gardens are reached, in a ‘passport control’ at the entrance. Here stand uniformed servicewomen in the fashions of the early 1940s, giving us a first taste of the French wartime theme that director Tom Littler has lent to the production.

Though not always an admirer of such devices, I must admit that this one works splendidly, with the bad hat Duke Frederick at the centre of a Nazi-saluting court, and Duke Senior, the brother he has usurped, hiding out in the Forest of Arden as head of a Resistance group.

Both dukes are played by the admirable Jonathan Oliver who also shows an astonishing versatility (and capacity for high-speed costume change) as two of the play’s comic characters, the appalling goatherd Audrey and the kindly shepherd Corin. The shortage of actors, with a cast of only eight, can itself be the inspiration for comedy, as when the actors affect to have no one available to handle the Touchstone/Audrey nuptials and a member of the audience has to become the vicar. On press night – to huge applause – the role went to the acting (literally here!) Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Rev Colin Fletcher, present in his purple fig. A one-night only gig, alas.

The play’s principal love interest, concerns the exiled duke’s sparky daughter Rosalind and her lovesick swain Orlando, given to papering the woods with doggerel verses in her praise.

Rhiannon Sommers and Joe Eyre supply hugely watchable sexual chemistry in a production which, at nearly three hours, is just a little too much of a very good thing.

Continues until September 12, see creationtheatre.co.uk or call 01865 766266