Even Marie Antoinette might have lost her head over the latest show from Fevered Sleep that offers four to seven year-olds a real taste of theatrical innovation. Ushered into a small room where they are crowned kings and queens for the piece's hour-long duration, the children are invited to a feast by the Princess Victoria Sponge. Then its on to the grand banqueting hall where the children are seated around a huge table that serves both as dining place and stage.
Feast Your Eyes tells the story of a giant who eats small children (he is rather fond of tiny triplet trifle with toes), the gluttonous princess who escapes his clutches but devours her parents and lives alone in her castle eating and sleeping, and the poor people who are left to starve-it is parents and carers who get cast in this role. It is a revolutionary parable that even Karl Marx would have admired but it is not so much the story itself that is interesting here, as the telling of it.
The show is a box of theatrical delights and tricks that includes milk-filled rubber gloves standing in for a cow's udder, flying leek and banana birds, houses made out of cheese cubes, broccoli forests and sliced white bread bed sheets. The company use silhouettes to particularly good effect-a scene in the cellar complete with gruesome spiders takes place underneath the stage-and it is ordinary kitchen implements that supply the percussion soundtrack.
The text of the story itself could do with a poet's touch, but it is no real matter because your are indeed feasting your eyes on this clever little theatrical titbit. A word of warning: the age range is very precise, and younger children may find the entertaining mix of murder and cannibalism a bit much. At the end we all gorge on fairy sponges. Let them eat cake, and grab yourself a piece before it runs out.
· Until January 4. Box office: 020-7223 2223 .
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