Pericles, Lyric Hammersmith, London

Who would have thought it? Pericles, long neglected, is now getting its third airing in six months. After Ninagawa's elegiac Japanese production, and the joint RSC-Cardboard Citizens venture that treated it as a play about asylum seekers, Neil Bartlett has come up with a conceptualised chamber version.

At first, I was sceptical. After all, this rambling romance takes its wandering hero on a prolonged journey round the Med before the family reunion.

But Bartlett's Pericles is a hospitalised, pyjama-clad figure apparently making an interior journey. Not only does this conflict with Shakespeare's marine obsession but also with the glowing realism of the scenes in the Mytilene brothel.

And, if Pericles's adventures are all internal, why does Bette Bourne's stage-managing narrator point out his peregrinations, from Tyre to Ephesus, on a blackboard?

My doubts were overcome by several things. One, inevitably, is the timeless magic of the play itself: beyond King Lear it is hard to think of a more moving father-daughter reunion than that between the aged Pericles and the virtuous Marina.

Bartlett's concept also gives this textually contentious, geographically restless play homogeneity. For once you scarcely notice the join when Shakespeare takes over the writing from that shadowy hack, George Wilkins, in the third act.

More importantly Bartlett's framing device imparts the configuration of a medically induced dream. The concept is also broad enough to allow for a mixture of realism and magic. When Pericles's wife is cast overboard at sea, she is restored to life in a modern hospital supervised by a briskly compassionate, holistic sister.

But when, 14 years later, Marina is appointed to be murdered on a beach in Tarsus, the simple device of opening one of the doors in the institutionalised set creates the effect of wind and waves.

And it's a measure of the production's success that the narrator's appeal to our imagination to bridge the gaps in time and place raises an assenting laugh.

Pericles, played by Will Keen, also shows the innocent bemusement of a man on a voyage of self realisation: his rapt interrogation of Marina is a delight.

And there is sterling work from Angela Down doubling as the restorative Cerimon and flame haired madam; from Bruce Alexander as both the henpecked Cleon and bumptious bawd; and from Michael Gould as the incestuous Antiochus and brothel creeping governor.

In some hands, conceptualised Shakespeare is a straitjacket. But Bartlett's intelligent treatment - a psychological quest - allows the audience to go on their own personal journey of discovery.

· Until October 18. Box office: 08700 500 511.