Peter Pan

This is JM Barrie's 'wonderful boy' as you've never seen him: tough, masculine, with the wisecracking street wisdom of an urban urchin - and resolutely Scots. Writer David Greig and director John Tiffany have reinvented the tale for this National Theatre of Scotland production, shaking it free of soppy Disney associations and the tacky tinsel of a million Christmas versions, and shifting it north of the border from its usual picturesque London Edwardiana.

This is the age of Victorian industry, a world of stone, steel and rivets under brooding Scottish skies. Laura Hopkins's ingenious designs have a forbidding majesty: the perfect setting for a thrilling phantasmagoria of childhood dream and nightmare, alternately murky and brilliant.

Here, Mr Darling (Cal MacAninch) is an engineer, hard at work supervising the construction of the Forth Bridge. Its curves and struts swarm with grimy builders who try to attract the attention of Kirsty Mackay's bookish Wendy: 'Why don't you all just grow up?' she cries, signalling that these will - when the bridge rotates and miraculously transforms into three barnacled pirate galleons in Neverland - become Peter's tribe of Lost Boys. Daddy undergoes a startling change too - from the nervous breadwinner eager to please his overbearing boss, to a blood-freezing, kilted Captain Hook, with shaven head and elaborate tattoos.

As for Kevin Guthrie's Peter, with his bare chest and hair tousled into two horn-like spikes, he lives up to the mischievousness of his namesake, Pan, and he has a savage streak hinted at in Barrie's book but rarely seen in stage adaptations. His world is wild, raw, elemental: Tinkerbell is a ball of flame, and the marvellous flying is done without any futile attempt to conceal the wires. It's real rough-theatre magic.

The pace becomes a little ponderous in the later scenes, but otherwise, the terrific score of traditional and original music, which doesn't shy away from a witches' reel or a bitter paean to the temptations of whisky, keeps the action rollicking along. Gripping, inventive and splendid with gritty grandeur.