They've played in marquees, they played through the Blitz but in their 70-year history, celebrated this year, Regents Park Shakespeare can seldom have been subject to such an inauspicious beginning.

This week, like last, the heavens have opened. But, as we sat stoically under dripping umbrellas on Tuesday night, watching the New Shakespeare Company going through their

paces on a stage dangerously awash, there was a strange felicity to

the downpour.

For, after all, As You Like It is the play where nature takes pride of place, where the forest and rough weather are the deus ex machinas of transformation. ''Sweet are the uses of adversity,'' trills the banished Duke in his opening speech. Truly, if love can be seen to flourish under such conditions, the odds are it's going to survive almost anything. The wonder is that Rebecca Johnson's bright, shining-faced Rosalind and Benedict Cumberbatch's desperate Orlando really do convince us of romantic love's passionate intensity They echo Andie MacDowell and Hugh Grant's sodden Four Weddings climactic embrace, but this time entirely authentically.

Johnson and Cumberbatch, however, are by no means the only

pleasures in a beguiling production by Rachel Kavanaugh, who last year gave us the equally sharp-edged, Caledonian Much Ado. Kavanaugh's modernist setting - Ruritania via Edwardiania with a touch of 1920s - is full of fresh thoughts on the play's various manifestations of love, particularly in its suggestions that John Hodgkinson's superb check-suited, Jim Broadbent-lookalike clown, Touchstone, secretly harbours the ''hots'' for Rosalind's pal, Celia. Kavanaugh's insight suggests it's a matter of class - that only the aristos in As You Like It get to have their lover of choice, while lesser orders must settle for second best. Fascinating. Warmly recommended.

The Open Air season, which includes Romeo and Juliet and a revival of Oh What a Lovely War in late July, runs until September 7.