Ovid's Metamorphoses @ Tron

It's wonderful to see a group of people who are not only willing, but who are actually able to completely disregard the limitations of genre: performers who toss in any element from live performance, stretch it to its limit, and then polish it to perfection.

Pants on Fire's visually spectacular musical retelling of Ovid's Metamorphoses reinvents each tale in a gloriously technicolour 1940s aesthetic. The show shifts the frame of reference as easily and as efficiently as the shape shifting gods, while keeping the pace upbeat, and the core of myths about love, sex and illusion intact.

Behind the show is a concentration of talent that is almost obscene. It's the work of a handful of individuals, all trained actors, each one a proficient musician. But it also incorporates the stagecraft of professional magician Jonathan Davenport, the background in puppetry of Mabel Jones, the original 1940s music hall score from composer Lucy Eggers, as well the influence of Lecoq as a teacher on Eggers and director Peter Bramley, which may well have contributed to the show's mastery of physical comedy.

The limitations of the live event give this Metamorphoses its unique appeal. Necessity demands a continual reimagining of available elements, and when a company can harness this the effect is that everything onstage is invested with an infinite and interconnecting network of metaphor. This is what Pants on Fire know how to achieve, effortlessly, and without taking themselves too seriously, and it's what made Metamorphoses my pick of last summer's Fringe. It's theatre about gods, but if the gods were making their own theatre it might look something like this.