Pericles, The Roundhouse, London

Fresh from directing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the West End (and from resigning as RSC chief), Adrian Noble now offers us a Pericles that keeps threatening to turn into a feel-good family musical. There are moments when his version of this late Shakespearean romance sounds like an audition for Disney. This is a pity, because the production boasts many impressive features – a powerfully involving atmosphere, a genuine sense of wonder, and a strongly bonded company who fully deserved the rapturous ovation they received on the opening night.

Noble's staging certainly makes the great circular engine shed of the Roundhouse feel a natural home for this haunting story of storm-tossed east Mediterranean wanderings, grievous loss and miraculous reunions. In Jean Kalman's superb lighting scheme, the sky glints with a host of oriental lamps. Costumed musicians playing Greek instruments are lined up on either side of a long catwalk that extends over the rug-covered floor and ends in a bulb-shaped inner stage nicely calculated to accommodate and heighten both the ceremonial (fierce chivalric sword fights) and the intimate (the matchless reunion scene between Pericles and his long-lost daughter Marina).

Noble brings life to all areas of this huge venue. At the court of the wicked king of Antioch, a grisly Saatchi-style collection of the severed heads of previous suitors drops from on high and dangles in mid-air to intimidate our hero into silence over the the incestuous royal secret. The vision of Diana is presented as a breathtaking aerial stunt. Strong on spectacle, the production also imparts an attractive sense of the play's salty, realistic humour. Trying to warm the shipwrecked Pericles, one of the simple fishermen rubs this exotic stranger as though he were polishing some prized trophy. In a lovely, droll touch, two clients of the brothel suggest by their prissy air of astonishment that they have been quite scandalised by the goodness of Marina, who is destroying trade with her crusading chastity.

As the suffering Pericles, Ray Fearon cuts a charismatic figure and speaks the verse imposingly, but his performance lacks those moments of quiet innerness that would touch the heart. He is bigger on decibels than on disarmingly unaffected emotion in the first of the recognition scene, where the honours go to Kananu Kirimi's piercingly simple and direct Marina. With its corrupted text and seemingly loose episodic structure, Pericles is sometimes regarded as the ugly duckling of the late romances. There have been productions that have highlighted (through doubling and visual echoes) the eerie psychological continuity of a play where the sin of incest, discovered at Antioch, seems to resurface in a minatory, coded form at all of the hero's subsequent ports of call, until the threat is finally confronted and redeemed by reunion with his daughter.

The binding element in Noble's production is much more sentimental. In Shaun Davey's over-obtrusive score, there's a recurring sugary song about the ever-turning compass of the winds and the differing fortunes they bring. First heard in the Andrew Lloyd Webberish rendition of Lauren Ward (as Pericles' wife Thaisa), this ditty – with its reassuring coda "I will carry you home" – passes, on this character's apparent death, to the Nurse Lychorida (Sirine Saba) and then to Marina. But it lays on the poignancy too thick: in a play where the hero thinks he hears the music of the spheres, Pericles is here treated to music that would not sound out of place in a Disney version of the play. Showering the final family tableau with a cascade of pretty petals, this production is so determined to be heart-warming that it may leave some people with heartburn.

To 13 July (0870 609 1110)