While the centenary of the death of French novelist Jules Verne last year passed largely unnoticed in this country, Newbury's Watermill Theatre is staging a tribute to that author's tremendous imaginative skills.

Ade Morris, the Watermill's director of Outreach, has written a new dramatisation of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, that is already proving extremely popular. Since Verne never set out to write specifically for children, it is worth emphasising that this is a genuine all-age play which accurately reflects Verne's wit and innovative thinking.

Against a predominantly grey backdrop, reminiscent of the original illustrations to Verne's novel, the story is presented by its main actor, Prof Aronnax (Paul Hegarty), whose role alternates between telling the story of his encounter with the enigmatic Captain Nemo (Peter Marinker) and his adventures onboard the submarine Nautilus as if in a lecture to his marine biology students, and acting out those momentous events.

He is accompanied by his Belgian manservant Conseil, a comic yet down-to-earth character, who, in Philippe Spall's lively portrayal, has much in common with Passepartout in Around the World in 80 Days. The pair are joined by an African harpooner with the unlikely name of Ned Land (Andrew Ufondu), whose impetuousness and constant fretting against his loss of freedom makes him a good foil for Aronnax's intellectual curiosity, although he remains a character that can only have come out of 19th-century colonialism.

A host of minor characters, ranging from seamen to fish, are well handled by Sean Carlsen and Daniel Wiltshire.

The play takes us across the world, from the US to Europe via a hitherto undiscovered tunnel from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, and back to the South Pole.

There are encounters with danger, caused both by marine life (sea spiders and a giant squid) and by a pursuing fleet of warships. And there's a whole new and strange world within the submarine itself, where food comes in the form of dolphin cheese and Pacific squid ink (not unlike a good Mdoc, apparently).

The characters' underwater fate makes for an absorbing couple of hours of theatre, and the production is well worth the trip from Oxford. It runs until May 6.