"There are no fig leaves," says Rupert Gould. "In a weird way the nudity is the most profound thing about the whole show.

"Now we have a lad's mag culture there are naked forms all over the place - but always squeezing their tits together, never just walking around.

"Seeing nudity that is unaffected for me embodies Paradise. I've got a baby son at the moment and when I see him in the bath I do think, well, why on earth would anyone wear socks?"

This, along with why are we here and why do rubbish things happen, is just one of the questions John Milton sought to answer when, in the mid-1600s, he began to dictate his epic poem Paradise Lost.

Retelling the Christian myth from Lucifer's banishment from Heaven to Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden, it is a vast, cosmos-spanning work, comprising 12 books and some 12,000 lines of blank verse. So how on earth do you put it on the stage?

"Bold, simple theatricality," answers Gould, who directs the Oxford Stage Company in this adaptation by Ben Power.

"We've tried to use all the elements of theatre-making but not at the same time - the trick has been not to throw the kitchen sink at it but to say, Is this image we're creating telling a story and is it beautiful and exciting?'

"The biggest undertaking has been on the design front - what should the guy playing Death be like? What should Paradise look like? I mean, the poem is very weird and abstract in places - lots of angels having sex in weird, ectoplasmic ways."

To arrive at their depiction of Death, in Milton's poem a vulgar, vicious and perpetually hungry creature, Gould's creative team discussed "what was most repulsive", from aggressive accents to American imperialism, from the brutal, never-ending imprisonments of Guantanomo to the "awful trailer trash families" you get on American chat shows.

"So our Death is not," concludes Gould, "a standard man in a skull hat." Satan meanwhile, played "very sympathetically" by Jasper Britton, looks like "Pacino in Scarface crossed with Malcolm McDowell".

Influenced by the visual courage of non-British theatre, Gould has produced a piece of physical theatre in which video and music (think Bach meets DJ Shadow) are vital in conveying Milton's emotional and abstract concepts. With the help of choreographer Liam Steel, best known for his work with DV8, a dance element has also been introduced to cope with stage directions such as "And then the angels fall out of heaven" and ensure that the audience aren't "simply bombarded with acres of text".

At the same time, Gould insists that the essence of this production is Milton's language, which requires of his actors "huge vocal muscularity".

"What's extraordinary about the language is that sometimes it rewards full-throated commitment and at others it works almost conversationally," he explains.

At one recent performance, Gould was pleased to see three young goths enjoying the show - if nothing else, he says, he hopes this production will serve as a great introduction to a work which might otherwise remain on the shelf.

But he has been careful not to be accused, like Milton himself, of being "of the devil's party".

"You want to avoid moralising on either side - being too pro-Satan or too Christian with it," he says.

"Debates still rage around Paradise Lost and another big challenge for us was the potential or perceived sexism of this piece. Obviously Eve's crime' has been central to generations of sexism.

"But I also think the poem has a really strong feminist slant.

Transgression is wrong in itself but sometimes having the courage to break the rules is also what's most admired. "The two great rule-breakers are Eve and Satan, and that's also part of their appeal."

Starts: Tue May 9 to Sat May 13, 7.45pm; Thur May 11 and Sat May 13 matinees, 2.30pm. Tickets: £20, £15, £10; Thurs matinee, £16, £13, £9. In association with Theatre Royal, Brighton