HEADLONG

Under Rupert Goold's artistic directorship, Oxford Stage Company has entered a new era. Renamed Headlong Theatre, it launches its inaugural season, entitled Reinventing the Epic, with the first major revival of Edward Bond's scintillating satire since the play opened at the Royal Court in 1981. Goold's production is a bold and promising statement of intent. Bond's text spits acid wit back into the grotesquely painted face of the ruling class. Exquisitely funny yet brimming with contained fury and disgust, it's challenging, riveting and deeply disturbing - not least when it is making us laugh hardest.

Using theatrical archetypes from the Restoration stage, Bond holds a mirror up to a world where human beings are commodities to be exploited, and where the working class kill and die for the socially privileged. Foppish Lord Are (a creepily excellent Mark Lockyer), aristocratic but broke, marries the wealthy country squire's daughter Ann Hardache for her money, but finds her a constant irritant. When he inadvertently stabs her to death over the breakfast table, he accuses his servant, Bob - who, socially conditioned to obey and to believe that unquestioning loyalty is the only route to advancement, keeps quiet about the deception. As Bob sits in prison in the shadow of the gallows, innocently awaiting the pardon he is convinced that his master will arrange, only Rose, his black wife and the daughter of a former slave, sees the hideous injustice that surrounds them, and its inevitable violent consequences.

The action is punctuated by songs set to jaunty new music by Adam Cork that supply a shocking commentary on the action. Rewritten material by the playwright updates the play's searing socialist critique and exploration of the meaning of freedom from Thatcher's Britain to Blair's: lyrics about suicide bombers and terrorist plots sit alongside timeless images of brutality such as the slaughter of a terrified calf, symbol of a powerless individual condemned to bloody death.

Goold's production appalls as it amuses, relentlessly confronting us with our willingness to laugh at cruelty when it is packaged as a social norm and silkily beribboned with elegant language and manners. Colin Richmond's design, with its absurd wigs and deathly make-up, and Oliver Fenwick's shadowy lighting give the performers a nightmarish, monstrous aspect; and the acting absorbingly makes the transition from queasy comedy to horror. The play has an inescapable didacticism, but Goold teaches its lesson with passion and flair. Frighteningly relevant; frighteningly good.

The resurgence of interest in the plays of Edward Bond - whose extraordinary body of work gives him a far better claim than most to being the greatest of post-war British playwrights - is one of the more cheering recent developments in British theatre. Rupert Goold's production of Restoration for Headlong, as Oxford Stage Company now calls itself, will continue the rehabilitation begun with Sheffield's recent revival of Lear.

Like a savage 18th-century Upstairs Downstairs with added politics, Bond's 1981 play parodies traditional restoration comedy to tell a mordantly funny story of class, injustice and the way capital and privilege make alliances to protect their own interests, and the poor and exploited collude in their own oppression. As is often the case in Bond's work, politics and aesthetics work together as one in a play that rings with wild laughter, and chills you to the bone.

When the impoverished but aristocratic fop Lord Are kills his rich wife, his footman Bob is persuaded to take the blame, putting his faith in the promises of his master that he will be pardoned before he swings on the gallows. "If it weren't for his lordship, I'd kill myself," declares Bob, a man imprisoned by his own naivety. His wife, Rose, who has learned the lessons of history and her forebears' slavery, knows never to trust the privileged. When Bob protests that what happened was a mistake, she declares: "They have accidents; we make mistakes."

Both play and production are slow to catch fire. But once we get to the murder scene, it's fireworks all the way in Goold's beautifully conceived production, which understands both the play's brutal humour and its knowledge that a world without justice is a world of intolerable cruelty.