A CAST of hundreds, played by two elves and a variety of shoes, will undertake an unforgettable journey in The Studio at York Theatre Royal this Easter.

Welcome once more to the wild imagination of Nick Lane, the Yorkshire playwright who defies the laws of mathematics and logic in his shows with the big ideas and unfeasibly small casts.

After Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty And The Beast, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame and Snow White, here comes his latest adaptation, The Elves & The Shoemaker, booked in for a fairytale run from March 29 to April 21.

"Join Corky and Peeptoe, the weirdest elves nobody has ever met, " says Nick's invitation. "Hear how they were present at almost every fairytale event ever written.

In fact they wrote most of them."

Technically, Lane wrote most of them in his latest commission from Theatre Royal artistic director Damian Cruden. "Gun for hire!"

jokes Nick. "After I did Little Red Riding Hood as a court case, Damian said 'why not do the Three Bears'. I said, 'could I have three actors?', and he said, 'no, two actors, three bears, that would be fun'."

Instead, Nick settled on The Elves & The Shoemakers, and decided to change his writing style.

"This is my first adventure story, the full Raiders Of The Lost Ark, " he says. "It'll be a rip-roaring adventure though there's still all the usual comic nonsense."

Nick finished the script before Christmas. "It's a very slight, short story, so I had to fill it with something, and I decided the Shoemaker's wife should be a socialite wannabe type, who's sick of her husband giving money away, " he reveals. "There are two stories running together in it, so it's more like a serial as opposed to the usual 'wow, hilarious, bums, bogeys, trousers' stuff."

Lane's latest premiere will be directed by Eamonn Fleming, a regular cast member in his family plays, in the repertory highlight of the Studio spring programme.

The season will open with Reform Theatre Company's revival of Gordon Steel's first play, Dead Fish, his humorous and moving account of one family's struggle to survive the rigours of daily life in a steel town, from February 22 to 24.

Next up, from February 27 to March 3, the University of York's Out Of The Blue Company will stage Mad Forest, Caryl Churchill's story of the lives and loves of a liberated people, just after the Romanian revolution of 1989.

Edward Duncan Smith, son of the former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, will star in the University of York Drama Society's production of Witkiewicz's The Madman And The Nun from March 6 to 10. This will be joined in a double bill of psychological dramas by Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis, another portrait of "mind disorders and what it means to be insane".

The taboo subject of love and sensuality in old age will be explored by York-born star of the silver screen Faith Brook in The Colour Of Poppies, from April 25 to 27, while Damian Cruden's production of The Hare And The Tortoise, a study of the nature of friendship and true love, will be performed in York for the first time from May 2 to 19 in the daytime after the Theatre Royal took it to Japan last year. Among the cast will be a drummer from Japan.

One of the amateur highlights of 2006 in North Yorkshire, York Settlement Players' York premiere of The York Realist, will have a thoroughly deserved revival in The Studio, from May 9 to 19 in the evening slot. Peter Gill's cultureclash play is set in a sleepy farming village near York at the time of the 1963 Mystery Plays.

Cruden will direct York Theatre Royal Youth Theatre in The Burial At Thebes, Seamus Heaney's new translation of Sophocles's Antigone, which will be presented in tandem with David Farr's political satire, The UN Inspector, from March 14 to 17.

For tickets, phone 01904 623568 or book on line at www.yorktheatreroyal.co.uk