Famous though it is, excellent though it is, John Arden's anti-war drama Serjeant Musgrave's Dance has never done well at the box office.

When it opened at the Royal Court in 1959 (with Ian Bannen in the title role and a cast that included Stratford Johns and Frank Finlay) it ran for only 28 performances and made a loss of £5,000, a huge sum then. On Tuesday at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, the audience was pretty thin for the opening of a new production by the Oxford Stage Company. As I savoured this powerful, compelling and at all times lucid presentation of an admittedly puzzling play, I pondered the curious customer resistance to the work of this "giant of modern playwriting," as OSC's artistic director Dominic Dromgoole has correctly described Arden.

In part it is the hectoring, lecturing tone perceived (often wrongly) to characterise his plays; then there is the Brechtian use of song and dance which now seems a tad old-fashioned. In this play, specifically, there is the strangeness of a central character who believes himself a pacifist but is in fact a homicidal maniac driven by religious mania -- but, then again, such a man now lends an oddly modern resonance to the action.

'Black Jack' Musgrave, superbly played by Edward Peel, at first appears the very model of a mid-Victorian army sergeant -- fiercely loyal, utterly self-disciplined, devoted to the cause of Britain's interests abroad. Just the sort of man, then, to have others flocking to the flag when he arrives in a strike-riven mining town on what at first seems to be a recruiting mission. With him are three red tunicked soldiers: the happy-go-lucky Irishman, Sparky (Billy Carter), the affable old Scot, Attercliffe (John Stahl), and the dangerously pent-up Hurst (Tobias Menzies).

Their arrival would appear to be a godsend for the forces of law and order as represented by the no-nonsense mine-owning mayor (Colin Tarrant), the oh-so-superior rector (Sam Cox) and their loyal agent, the doltish constable (Simon Cox). While the striking colliers' clear-sighted union leader Walsh (Dermot Kerrigan) will have no truck with the soldiers and the eagle-eyed boatman Bludgeon (Fred Pearson) always seems aware of dirty deeds in the offing, their friends start to warm to the outsiders -- not least because of the money they are able to splash about in the pub (where director Sean Holmes arranges for some excellent clog-dancing). The seen-it-all landlady Mrs Hitchcock (Lynda Rooke) and randy barmaid Annie (Maxine Peake) are happy to oblige, too, in their different ways. But a much darker picture develops when one of the soldiers is accidentally killed and the true reason for their presence in the town is at last revealed by their zealot leader.

Serjeant Musgrave's Dance continues at the Everyman until October 4. It comes to the Oxford Playhouse from November 4 to 8 and should on no account be missed.