IF you have enjoyed the inspired, beautiful, strange and wonderful world of Cornish company Kneehigh Theatre on their regular Yorkshire visits, next Tuesday is a chance to see two of their leading players in York.

Performers Giles King and Craig Johnson are on tour in Black Fish and Makin Projects’ Alaska, directed by Kneehigh assistant director Simon Harvey and written by Carl Grose, another Kneehigh collaborator.

Frustratingly, Kneehigh have never played York, so please make the most of Tuesday’s 7.45pm performance in the Theatre Royal Studio, where Alaska will “boldly follow in the intrepid footsteps of Bear Grylls and Ray Mears, using film, firelight, shadow, a whole host of forest wildlife and one hell of a soundtrack to transport you into The Unknown in a tragi-comic riot of Pythonesque dottiness”.

“I’ve been wanting to do a project off my own back, and I thought, there’s a gap in Kneehigh’s schedule, let’s fill it with our own show,” says Giles King, actor, deviser and co-producer. “So Craig and I are touring Alaska till March, doing about 36 dates,” says Giles.

“For me it was a chance for a departure into the old-school, high-risk strategy way of working: to write a play of devised ‘improv’ [improvisation] starting from nothing, so I presented to the rest of the team the concept of a man going out to explore Alaska.”

Have you ever been to Alaska, Giles? “No, I haven’t, but I’ve done plenty of research!” he says. The resulting play presents Alaska as a wilderness of untamed beauty, where you can be at one with nature, but also a desolate wasteland at the borderline of civilisation, where you can easily lose your way, your bearings and your very mind. One man goes in search of adventure, freedom and “a piece of the good life” but is plunged into a nightmarish world of extreme survival, haunted by all things, living, dead and native.

From a starting point of exploring Giles’s interest in situation comedy – “which is my bag with Kneehigh”, he says – he and Graig worked out a structure for the basic story and then started to improvise with the director and writer, who would write the script from those sessions.

What emerged was a tragedy and a comedy, “a rollercoaster of a tragicomedy”. “We created this character called Justin, who’s a bit of a nerd, a bit of an idiot, who lives in the shadow of his brother, who unlike him gets everything right,” says Giles.

“Justin goes out to Alaska to do a video diary of his time there, and in our show the camera position is the audience’s view, as if they were the camera looking at him, so it’s a very much a direct address to the audience – and right from the outset you have this strange theatrical convention that the audiences have really loved in the shows so far.”

Justin’s journey spans the end of summer to the big winter freeze, the temperature plummeting to minus 40 degrees C for the second half. Thankfully, you will only have to imagine such bitter coldness. “We use all sorts of things, a smoke machine, blue lighting, and plastic snow that Craig, in his narrator role, pelts me with.”

Plastic snow, Giles? “You just look up ‘theatrical snow’ on the internet, order it and the next day it arrives in a bag.” Instant Alaska.

“I think, for the best theatre, you give the audience just enough hints of things and let the imagination do the work,” says Giles.

Sometimes, he even lets the audience to do the work for him. “They’ll become the Northern Lights at one point, recreating the Aurora Borealis with 50 different coloured torches,” he reveals.

Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk

• Giles King and Craig Johnson will return to Kneehigh Theatre’s ranks for the upcoming tour of Tristan And Yseult.