Love, lust and lynching in Fuente Ovejuna (Mellowdrama at MITP) is another good and sometimes clever example of how to seize a classic of European literature and make it palatable to a young audience. It does this by introducing strong elements of comedy, some farcically conceived characters and a sizeable number of modern pop songs that dominate much of the production.

Julia Calvert’s Isabella must rank with the funniest performances of 2011- Paul Xuereb

This adaptation of the original, by Daniel Goldman, makes sure the core of the play remains perfectly comprehensible and a torture scene and other unpalatable sequences are still depicted as the sinister events they are.

Wesley Ellul’s direction deals well with these scenes and handles what is an important element of the production, that of sometimes very active audience participation, quite well.

On the other hand, the many comical or romantic scenes tend to go somewhat over the top, and when the young members of the audience realise they are an active part of the production, they tend to behave as if this were a panto, uttering loud sighs of approval, for instance, when two of the actors are kissing.

Ellul eschews using a set and limits himself to a small sofa on a platform for use by the two royals, both here parodied mercilessly, Ferdinand and Isabella, the famous reyes catolicos.

The play is set in 1476, but costumes are modern, making light of concepts of droit du seigneur and medieval military orders, but of course we have long grown accustomed to Hamlet and Midsummer Night’s Dream in modern clothes.

The plot is set mainly in the Spanish village of Fuente Ovejuna (Sheep Fountain), the lord of which is the dastardly and lustful Don Fernan Gomez de Guzman, Knight of the Order of Calatrava, who insists on having the virginity of all the girls in the village and even on sleeping with married women when their husbands are away.

He is hotly pursuing Laurencia, a girl who strongly believes she must surrender her honour only when she gets married and who manages to enrage him by her defiance.

Her other suitor, an honourable young man, Frondoso, manages to get her consent to marry him and when Guzman meets the lovers, expels Frondoso and assaults the girl, Frondoso threatens to shoot Guzman with the knight’s own crossbow.

Gusman is incensed and when he comes back from a war expedition and finds the couple at their wedding celebration, he has his men beat up Frondoso, threatens him with death, and drags the girl away to have his pleasure with her.

This leads the girl’s father, the mayor Esteban, to convene a secret meeting of the townspeople, where he tries to convince them they must resist the tyrant. The return of the ravished Laurencia who delivers a fiery speech urging the villagers to take strong action, leads to a great onslaught on Gusman who is stoned to death by them.

This is one of the cardinal scenes in the play with both cast and all members of the audience being taken away from the auditorium to another area inthe building to be harangued, and then led out into the large courtyard where they stone Gusman to death; fortunately, I hasten to add, with non-lethal missiles.

When the lynching is reported to king and queen, the royals send a magistrate to enquire into the matter, but even his torturing of a number of villagers produces in every case the reply: “Fuente Ovejuna did it” to the question, “Who killed Gusman?” There is a royal pardon, and the play can thus end happily.

Goldman’s play tries to create the happy and carefree atmosphere of the village when Gusman is around by making the young people – there are no old people, or perhaps the old keep looking young in this idyllic village – behave like young people in our century, and they are kept merry by the guitar-playing and singing of Frondoso (David Chircop) – nothing Spanish, nothing medieval, but all pieces in which members of the audience (depending on their age) can join.

The trouble with the villagers is that they all look and sound like middle class moderns, some of them fairly sophisticated, and there is nothing remotely little villager about them.

The panto atmosphere gets stronger in the scene where Frondoso, not much of a character but a stereotype of today’s young men, courts the wise, brave and winsome Laurencia (Jo Caruana), singing an endless series of pop tunes to the delight of some and the irritation of others.

For me it was a relief when Stefan Cachia Zammit’s stern Gusman in his black leather jacket came in and delivered his lines with the elegance and quiet strength I have come to expect of this actor.

“Evil, be thou my good”, I muttered to myself in Milton’s words. He is a bastard, all right, but in him the flame of the original play burns high. Cachia Zammit rises from the dead to play the enquiring magistrate, making him into a bit of a sadist as he slowly eats an apple while watching people being tortured.

Goldman makes Ferdinand and Isabella, two icons of Spanish history, into figures of ridicule. Jean-Pierre Busuttil, wearing a crown but also modern sports shoes, truly guys his character, perhaps excessively, whereas Julia Calvert is a supremely funny Isabella, wearing elegant black and hinting at real royalty, and then destroying the picture with her fixed smiles and wicked imitation of the speech and delivery of British royals. She never overdoes it. It is not a big part, but it must rank with the funniest performances of 2011.

Why was a woman, Alexandra Camilleri, cast as the Master of the Order of Calarava? It is a very small part, and could well have been omitted, but once it was kept in, it should not have been played by someone who is plainly a pretty young woman.