KNEEHIGH Theatre puts the adult into pantomime, but thankfully not in the crude blue manner of Jim Davidson and his humourless Boobs In The Wood parodies.

Instead,the travelling troupe from Cornwall admits to an obsession with folk stories and their journeys from playful innocence to bittersweet experience.

As with Kneehigh's signature show, The Red Shoes, director Emma Rice constructs and deconstructs a world of dark and light fantasy before your eyes in her newly devised show. Into a rainstorm in blue mackintoshes and Michael Caine spectacles steps her manic cast of five, all striking in an eccentric way that would draw the interest of portrait painters.

As they sing gaily of the rain, they build the set around them: a wooden framework and a wooden bed beneath a metal frame, circus high-wire walkway and all. In more ways than one this will be an artful production that will work on several levels.

Inspired by "our dear friend and collaborator", the late Charles Causley, Kneehigh and Emma Rice seek out and eke out the secret life in a story. "The simpler they look, the more should be going on underneath, like underneath a stone," Causley once wrote, and Kneehigh stretches its search to 160 minutes. Not one of those minutes is wasted.

The Wooden Frock is from the Cinderella shelf of the library, the slipper here replaced by the more carnal symbol of a wedding ring. In her dying wish, Bec Applebee's Mother wishes that her husband, John Surman's Father, should marry whomsoever the ring fits. Alas, the slim digit of daughter Mary (Amanda Lawrence) accommodates it most snugly as she play's a little girl's game of dressing up, only to discover she cannot free herself from her mother's coat or ring.

Trained to react to any predicament by her resourcefully unconventional Nurse (so unconventional the role is played by a man, Mike Shepherd), Mary dons a wooden frock and escapes across sea to a principality. That journey is shown through a combination of puppetry and video imagery, as Rice finds ever imaginative ways to spin a story complemented by songs that span blues, jazz and folk roots.

Mary's new world is weird one, an old British Empire conclave where the Prince (Shepherd again) passes playing cricket in the Geoff Boycott mould; Rex the dog (Surman) goes clambering into the audience; and the Prince's Mother (Alex Murdoch) is a glorious lush.

Nothing symbolises Kneehigh's wonderful way with theatrical storytelling than the use of white umbrellas on the tips of wellington boots to symbolise a gaggle of farmyard geese: the best use of umbrellas since Gene Kelly went singing in the rain.

Updated: 10:08 Friday, February 06, 2004