Malorie Blackman's hugely popular children's novel Noughts and Crosses has obvious, if not over-stated, parallels with Romeo and Juliet. Here again are two young lovers from the opposite sides of a yawning divide - a family feud of a sort once more, though this has its origins in the fact that Sephy and Callum belonging to different racial groups. She is a black 'Cross', he a white 'Nought'. But in Blackman's inversion of the world as it was - and in some places still is - this makes Sephy a 'have' and Callum a 'have not'.

It is a neat piece of casting that director Dominic Cooke should have chosen Richard Madden - who played Romeo to great acclaim this summer at Shakespeare's Globe - to portray Callum in his stage adaptation of the novel for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Once again we see something of the cheeky charm and boyish recklessness of his Romeo - which I much admired when the Globe production visited Wadham gardens in August. But more impressively, perhaps, he shows the inner toughness of a young man forced to make terrible choices in a climate of hate and mistrust as the story proceeds.

The quality of his performance is more than matched by Ony Uhiara's dignified, self-possessed Sephy. A rich girl with a social conscience, she sticks with Callum despite the trouble this brings from her school contemporaries. Home pressures prove somewhat stronger to resist, however, since her dad (Tyrone Huggins) is a powerful politician with a habit of getting his own way. This applies, no less, in the matter of his sex life. While presenting himself to the world as a happy family man, he is almost always elsewhere, leaving his wife (Jo Martin) pickling herself in a seemingly endless succession of drinks.

The well-managed scenes at the Hadleys' home - illuminated by a nicely comic turn from Tracy Ifeachor as Sephy's tough-cookie pragmatist of a sister - are the most enjoyable feature of this production. For the rest, much seems as glaringly obvious - naive even - as a children's novel might be expected to be. As it proceeds, you find yourself mentally ticking off the boxes on a wish-list of topics for classroom debate.

That the show - an odd one for Christmas, incidentally - is designed as 'family entertainment' presumably explains the coy approach to sex when it is eventually depicted. Many young people will be surprised by this, I think, having been led to believe - even if they haven't tried it themselves - that a successful performance generally involves the removal of an item or two of clothing.

As a consequence of the ongoing building works at the RSC's main Stratford base, the play is being staged in the Civic Hall. The audience is ranged on three sides of the ground-level performance area on specially imported tiered seating. This makes for compelling 'in yer face' action, to which Gary Yershon's music makes a significant contribution.

Noughts and Crosses is on till February 2. Bookings: 0844 800 1110 (www.rsc.org.uk)