Retelling the Christian myth from Lucifer's banishment from Heaven to Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden, Milton's epic poem is as exciting as literature gets.

So you know things have gone badly wrong when, midway through Eve's temptation, you find yourself trying to decide whether the apple in question is a Braeburn or Royal Gala.

With their shaven-headed Christ dressed in jeans and a hoodie, Oxford Stage Company are clearly going for maximum audience identification.

They probably wanted Dermot O'Leary. Instead they got an actor whose gestures are so unsubtle he appears to be signing for the T4 Hollyoaks Omnibus narrating a show which, in its over-literal physicality and crude emotional palette, would be patronising to even the youngest school parties.

Rupert Goold's production is full of bitty ideas, such as presenting Satan's incestuous family as Jerry Springer trailer-trash, or having post-fall Adam and Eve don commuter clothing with all the joyless resignation of 6am, Monday morning. But it is badly lacking in bold theatrical statements.

On opening night, it is almost as if the lighting, sound and stage designers had simply failed to show up.

The hell hounds that snarl from Sin's womb, for instance, sound like a single Scotty dog yapping into a Dictaphone, while a more awe-inspiring cosmos could have been created by covering the walls in those glow-in-thedark stars and turning off the lights.

From time to time, one of the winged characters will dangle artlessly on the fattest flight cables you've ever seen.

But the attempt at spectacle is largely confined to having characters gaze and point into the middle distance.

As for the costumes, the cast appear to have been told, school nativity style, either to make their own or borrow from their parents, the result a baffling combination of art-project "distressed chic" and BHS basics.

It will take much more than a cheap snake-print jacket to turn Jasper Britten's Satan (brother of This Morning's Fern, no less) into a convincing seducer.

While the hollow and pretentious choreography had me coughing back giggles, much of the verse speaking, hampered by clunking accents or devoid of tonal shades, made me want to weep.

Goold was first inspired to attempt this staging while at university, when a terminally ill tutor read aloud to him Milton's last 16 lines.

He should've held true to the simple power of the human voice and taught his cast to speak before directing them to fly.

Over brainstormed and under-imagined, Paradise Lost is a woeful disappointment. Who'd've thought this most lofty of classics could be made to fall so flat?

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