THE Wind In The Willows was Ian Brown's best production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, playing to 50,000 people last winter.

The Playhouse artistic director will be seeking to match that success with Adrian Mitchell's dramatisation of CS Lewis's wartime children's story The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe this season.

"For me, the pleasure is in seeing children with their parents and families all watching together and sharing something," says Ian. "It is interesting that parents want to expose their kids to theatre; I find that quite moving.

"I think there's joy in telling a story for children and for adults too, who live through a second childhood when seeing this show. Even young couples on a date will come, and that's because people love fantasy."

In Lewis's story, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are evacuated during the Second World War and find themselves in the rambling country house of Professor Kirk.

One rainy afternoon, Lucy's curiosity leads her to a forgotten wardrobe, and so begins a journey into Narnia, a mystical land of adventures and battles, the mighty lion Aslan and the wicked White Witch.

Designer Ruari Murchison conjures giant fur coats, forbidding statues and eerie iciness; costume designer Stephen Snell parades high-heeled reindeer and a sequin-spangled White Witch. Writer Mitchell, director Brown and his cast provide the rest.

"Adrian first did this adaptation for the Royal Shakespeare Company five, six, seven years ago and he's been very faithful to the book, sometimes maybe too faithful. We're staging it in a more fluid way, and ours is probably a more economic version with fewer people in the cast...and we don't have things coming out of the floor," says Ian.

"The RSC had ten more actors in their cast, though what they did with them I don't know! Just stand there!"

The scale will, nevertheless, be epic. "If you're going to do something large-scale, it really suits the Quarry at the Playhouse. The circular stage and the big revolve can be used in a very effective way and give the show a powerful dynamic," says Ian.

"It's essential to be able to go from one big scene to another; the challenge in the Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe is to go backward and forwards from place to place, and you think to yourself, 'How the hell do we do this?'"

Sound and video designer Mic Pool has an important contribution to make, Ian says. "Video gives it a little touch of magic when we need it. When we were struggling with the budget and said 'we just need something to give it a little sparkle', that's what video can do.

"As Mic's roots are in theatre rather than in video, he uses video sparingly, and that way he gives your senses a jolt," Ian continues. "I'm not a major fan of video in theatre; I came at it from a sceptical point of view but Mic has helped me to see its virtues."

In working on The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, Ian has found himself developing a preference for CS Lewis over J R Tolkien. "Lewis trusts his audience in a mature way and he's very good at foibles. Where I lose interest in Tolkien is when they go into battle, whereas when I went back to Lewis's books I realised how he draws very real characters in Narnia with very real foibles: strange children and adults that get on your nerves," he says.

"Tolkien said the Narnia books were completely beneath him, but Lewis goes deep into human emotions and I don't think you find all that in The Lord Of The Rings, where the terrible thing is that they're so boring and there's no characterisation to get hold of!"

The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until February 5. Box office: 0113 213 7700.

Updated: 10:08 Friday, December 10, 2004