EDMONTON -- Back a decade or so ago, Stewart Lemoine wrote an epic called The Book of Tobit. I remember the production sailing well past the three-hour mark and having so much fun, I hoped it would go on for hours yet.

I felt somewhat the same exhilaration while watching the Lemoine spectacular, Orlando Unhinged, now playing at Grant MacEwan College.

The story is taken from a sprawling work that, the program tells us, "is derived from various epics, romances, and heroic poems of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.'' But, as the jovial narrator (Stephen Delano) observes in the opening moments, since we'll probably never read the original, he has some dramatic friends who will present it for us.

And what a complex tale Lemoine spins. One, alas, that I can't possibly even outline here. During the production it all seemed to hang together in an Arthurian, Beowulfian sort of way, but sitting down to write about it hours later, darned if I can make any sense out of my notes.

There are questing knights, Amazonian women, a canny maid, a trilling hippogriff that flies to the moon to discover Mary Magdalene, Saracen sorceresses, enchantresses that change men into trees and a group of pirates whose job in life seems to be to sail the Mediterranean kidnapping maids to feed to their pet.

Delano is a lively, ingratiating narrator who brings a sense that he is having such a great time telling this you're-not-going-to-believe-what-happens-next story that he can scarcely contain himself.

Sheldon Elter is Orlando, the "bravest of all knights in the court of Charlemagne'' and he goes most wonderfully unhinged at the end of the play. Brianna Buckmaster is Bradamante, a bride whose prospective husband is taken from her through the old "potion-that-will-render-you-in-love-with the-first-person-your-eyes-behold-upon-awakening'' trick. Buckmaster gives a solid and strongly ironic read as most of the plot revolves around her.

The potion is delivered by Atlanta, a Saracen enchantress given a broad and comic read by Johannah Khlema. Kate Wylie is a vivacious Dalinda, another of the wily domestics so favoured by classic drama. Melissa Veszi is a most appealing and resilient Saracen princess - so lovely that men see her and immediately fall in love. Besides she's rich and rules over all of Asia. What she is doing in France surrounded by all these Christians is never fully explained.

It is enough to say that there is not a weak performance in the remarkable company of equals at Grant MacEwan. Lemoine has already shown he writes well for young people with his successes at the Citadel's late, lamented teen festival and, as director, he knows how to get the best out of his young charges. The play is loud, funny and fast - and it's a good thing because there is a lot of plot exposition here.

Much of the humour comes from Lemoine's droll ability to juxtapose his ersatz-Elizabethan with modern vernacular. After a while the humour and broad playing begin to hit one note just too often but the players are so exuberant and Lemoine's direction so continuously inventive (in Marissa Kochanski's excellent cartoon-like and highly adaptable set and Melissa Cuerrier's sumptuous costumes) that you are just carried along with the wave.

And any epic than ends in a frenzied pillow fight can't be all bad.

Orlando Unhinged, a production of Grant MacEwan College runs in John L. Haar Theatre on the Jasper Place campus until Sunday. (More: Theatre Reviews).

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