NICK Lane makes a strange if comic observation. "Hey, I've just noticed," he says. "If you wash your hands after fighting with a rubber chicken, they smell of pesto."

"You're right. They do," says Emily Fairman, Nick's co-star in his adaptation for children of Victor Hugo's epic French tale The Hunchback Of Notre Dame.

The rubber chicken lies by a chair in their rehearsal room at the Theatre Royal's Walmgate studios, having earlier come into play.

"We decided to have a chicken fight for no other reason than it's gratuitous. The cockerel is the national symbol of France, there's always sword-fighting in French plays, so why not a rubber chicken fight?," says Nick. "Things like the chicken, and the goat, are just embellishments to make the story more child-friendly."

The goat? "Nick said he had this idea that we should put the goat in the play, so now I'm working with a talking goat," says Emily, who is playing gipsy girl Esmerelda in her York Theatre Royal debut and her first stage role since giving birth to daughter Ruby a year ago.

"Nick thought we could have Esmerelda and the goat like a failed northern club act, so I've made her quite sweet and excitable and naively in love with Captain Phoebus, because it just wouldn't wash with kids that she's this tragic romantic heroine.

"So she's feisty and innocent, except when she performs with Djali the goat, and then they're always arguing because they've been touring together for so long."

Nick is quick to add: "That said, we do stick fairly closely to the narrative up to the final third, but the last 150 pages of the book are unremittingly dark, so we had to move away somewhat from that, because it is a show for children."

Like Patrick Barlow's National Theatre of Brent and Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding's Lip Service, he has made an art form of setting a cast of two loose on playing a multitude of roles, enabling him to make merry with classic stories while retaining the essence of the drama too.

His shows for children have become part of the Christmas furniture at Hull Truck Theatre, where the Hunchback show was first performed in 2002, and York Theatre Royal's Studio audience enjoyed a first taste of his daft but deft humour and storytelling skills in Beauty And The Beast last year.

In Hunchback, his principal role is Gringoire, a dreadful playwright.

"What we've done is to have him say it's his telling of the story, so the play is set in an old theatre space," says Nick. "By having him tell the tale, we can deconstruct the story and we can use that idea of him being a terrible playwright, so he ends up playing Phoebus, Quasimodo and a dozen city guards at the same time."

A goat, rubber chickens, a multitude of guards, and only two actors: will the Hunchback Of Notre Dame ever be the same again?

The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, April 1 to 24, morning and afternoon performances. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 16:24 Thursday, March 25, 2004