DOWNSTAIRS, a child is listening to a bedtime story. We cannot see her but, upstairs, or rather in The Studio, the story spirits known only as Mr F and Mr P are keeping an eye and ear on her, just as they do on all bedtime tales.

These guardians of bedtime tradition come dressed as spacemen, arriving in a white space pod as if they were aliens landing on a newly-discovered planet. They emerge in comical fashion, sticking a head out of one portal, an arm out of another, before their heads protrude out of the top at the same time with a startled look in their eyes.

Once on terra firma, Mr F (Eamonn Fleming) and Mr P (Robert Pickavance) gingerly leave their spacecraft and make contact with the primary school children in the morning audience, shaking hands and squirting water from a pistol at a child they have just given their umbrella to hold.

In Damian Cruden's delightfully playful production, the double-act slapstick in the vaudevillian tradition of Abbott & Costello goes down a treat, the children giggling excitedly and eager to be drawn into the storytelling of a theatre piece devised by Chris Bostock, Paul Harman and Niladri for Cleveland Theatre Company in 1998. Their mission is to keep the world of stories going round, and so every story spirals into a new tale, as they stir all manner of ingredients - cake, forest, wolf, turtle, whatever - into the mix until "the air is full of stories. "You must tell them to your friends, and then perhaps you would like to put them in a book," they say, by now back in their space pod, heading for another bedtime destination...but that's another story.

Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 12:45 Saturday, July 12, 2003