Food for Thought Theatre have thrown down the gauntlet and demanded satisfaction from the town of Oxford this week with The Three Musketeers. Audiences who venture down Pembroke Street will have no trouble gaining the honour of their ticket price back, but it may be harder for their competitors in the outdoor theatre space to so easily win this duel. This is just the company’s third production, yet it beggars belief that the run is only 5 nights in the courtyard of The Story Museum. From Martha Ibbotson’s fight choreography alone, we believed we were at the opening night of a long summer run.

The choice of play is à point, Dumas’ timeless tale of bromance in the court of King Louis strikes the perfect balance of high camp, court intrigue, and adventure for kids young and old. The location in the higgledy-piggledy courtyard of The Story Museum is ideal, and very well used. The casting came off without a hitch. Your titular trio of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (Simon Billington, Josh Wedge, and Joseph Hartshorn) have all the heft, swagger, and guffaw you could want, and their maturity sets nicely against Tom Wilson’s mercurial D’Artagnan. The youth made more innocent in this adaptation, painfully preening like the original fresh off the haycart Gascon farmboy he is. Roger Dalrymple slithers up and down the stairs as Cardinal Richelieu, surely one of the most satisfying baddies in fiction. His machinations and mannerisms never quite veer into Ming the Merciless territory, the spider-like Cardinal being a much more measured chap, but Dalrymple oozes as flamboyantly as the Musketeers swash buckles, and the play is a better balanced thing for it. James McDougall’s Count Rochefort is part Michael Palin, part Tony Robinson, and made for a magnificently murine henchman, he also covered good mileage and gave good coverage in several other minor parts.

Beth Burns needs only a hairband to transmogrify from frustrated Queen to slinking Femme Fatale, and in doing so her shoulders rather hold up the sky, elegantly providing space for the boys to play out their games of sword and words. Speaking of boys, Daisy Cook was an inspired choice as King Louis. The wig, the outfit, the vocal pitches, all so on note for the man who became king at 9 and couldn’t quite grow past that age — while still being a believably lovable monarch for Anne to fall for and the Musketeers to fight for. Tulsi Talbot is the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, Constance, giving great gal-pal energy one moment, and magnetic romantic interest the next, but this is foremost a tale of bromance, not romance, after all. Still, she has the best bit of prop-comedy I’ve seen in a venue like this in a long time, and is also, alongside her collaborator Harvey Coates, at the musical core of the performance. Their musical collective, Mayura, arranged the entire score masterfully, evoking Parisian taverns when needed, but referencing Studio Ghibli toward the end, tying the fairytale nature of the whole thing together neatly.

Given the size and ability of the cast, the seats available, and the evident effort that has been ploughed into this play, I felt as if they must be doing 3-4 nights per week for the next month at least. I was ready to write a review praising The Story Museum for their shrewdness in booking such an outfit for what could become a fixture of early summer’s entertainment. I daresay they could fill matinées here all term long, provided they keep the kids out of swords’ way. Unbelievably, it’s only around this week, so you must try your best to get a ticket as soon as you can!

If there's one thing you can definitely say about Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, it's a hell of a story. It’s bubbling over with purloined necklaces, scheming cardinals, international intrigue, boy's own adventures, simmering revenge, fake executions, and enough toxic-masculinity-cum-gay-subtext for six musketeers, never mind three. Dumas actually employed hack writers just to add more plot to his novels, and with this one they were working overtime – all to great effect, I should add.

So what better venue could you possibly find to stage this story of stories, than The Story Museum itself, a place dedicated to recounting tales and engaging children of all ages in the simple joy of telling a rollicking good romance?

But then, finding unique, original and effective venues is what Food For Thought, the production company behind The Three Musketeers, is all about. They take spaces that you may have never heard of, or may never have imagined as a possible theatrical set, and turn them into living, breathing theatres.

With The Three Musketeers, they have taken over the Museum’s inner courtyard, a space as old as Dumas’s novel itself, but nowadays festooned with walkways and spiral staircases, leading hundreds of daily visitors to different parts of the museum. It’s a ready-made, multi-layered set, complete with garrets, meeting-rooms and balconies, as well as an open area ideal for all that lovely sword-fighting. And the company makes full use of everything this gorgeous space has to offer, including, at one hilarious moment, the lift, which is operated by a torturer who looks mildly confused at having stepped momentarily into the future.

The costumes are sumptuous, with bustles and ball-gowns for the ladies and big, swaggering shirts and floppy hats for the men. This is a swashbuckling story, and fittingly there are buckles aplenty, on belts, shoes and scabbards. The sheer production quality of the wardrobe goes a long way to create that feeling of 18^th-century ribaldry, and the illusion would have been complete if Food For Thought had been able, somehow, to get some scenery on stage too. As the producer, Josh, said to me, he would have loved to have a few barrels in there. But one of the limitations of working with a shared space is time, and you have to make a few sacrifices. It's an understandable predicament, but it might have been worth shortening the play by half an hour to give it that extra dimension of believability.

The stars of this show are undoubtedly the musketeers themselves. Simon Billington, Josh Wedge, Joseph Hartshorn and Tom Wilson as Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan have the presence and the sheer vocal strength called for by these roles. They are big, booming and bombastic. I half expected one of them to swing on a rope across the courtyard like Errol Flynn. They are backed up by a supporting cast who, while they may not have the physical stature of a Gerard Depardieu, still manage to convey the intrigue of a French court in turmoil.

It seems a trifle surly to criticise a production as good-natured and joyful as this, but there is one area where it doesn’t quite take flight, and that is that it frequently feels overshadowed by the space itself. The courtyard is massive, and it’s often hard to hear characters conversing on the second or third level of the balconies. Similarly, they do sometimes feel a little static, when the show is so clearly calling for ‘big’ performances. It needs almost pantomime levels of action. They just don't fill the space. And the massive, central staircase can often mask entire conversations.

That said, there is so much to enjoy here, not least the little, deliberate, anachronistic nods to the future, and modern sensibilities. The villain Rochefort is discovered singing, appropriately for him, Je Ne Regrette Rien. And at one point the musicians play, as music for the Royal Party, Joe Hisaishi’s Merry-Go-Round of Life from the Studio Ghibli film Howl’s Moving Castle – something that will be instantly recognisable to many of the children visiting The Story Museum. The rampant gay subtext is unleashed in the latter stages of the show, with one of the musketeers declaring, ‘I am not in the mood for wenching!’ before planting a couple of full-on smackers on Porthos’s willing lips. But my favourite forward flash has to be at the climax of the show, when D’Artagnan transforms into Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride and almost – almost – says those immortal words: ‘You killed my father; prepare to die.’

The great irony of this new adaptation, though, is that it emphasises one massive difference in attitude between the days of Dumas and our own world. The ‘villains’ of The Three Musketeers are trying, outrageously, to do a deal that will avert war between France and England. The ‘heroes’ manage to thwart them in the name of the King, so that war can go ahead after all. The musketeers are so cuddly, full of honour, bravery and comradeship, with their famous rallying cry ‘One for all, and all for one!’ – it’s easy to forget their ultimate aim is war with England. But I think, on the basis of Food for Thought’s super-summery show, we’ll forgive them.