"I am Merlin, dreamer of perfect dreams," booms a small boy in the foyer, in stentorian approximation of what he had just heard on stage. "Yeah," his friend says, "he said it about a thousand times."
They're not wrong. For whoever the mythical Merlin may actually have been - advisor to Arthur, slayer of dragons, architect of Stonehenge - he is, in writer Charles Way's hands, one very repetitive wizard.
Way acknowledges that the oft intoned "dreamer of dreams" line is lifted from a 13th-century poem, which means that the immediate problem facing director Roger Haines and his cast is to keep a matinee audience of under-10s sufficiently focused on ancient poetry.
You wouldn't usually bet against it - Haines's Christmas shows at the Library Theatre are generally forged from such sterling imaginative metal that they can convince young audiences of anything. But with the popular ascent of Potter, Gandalf and their pals, wizardry has become a crowded market. Kids are now extremely discriminating about their sorcerers, and it requires a few strokes of real theatrical magic to make the illusion endure on stage.
Haines's show is a competent piece of storytelling but it lacks the hey-presto factor of previous offerings. The video projections are slick but can't compete with cinematic effects, and they kill the appetite for visual metaphor. What incentive is there to believe that Arthur can see fields, rivers and impregnable castles, when all we can actually see are two sparkly-robed extras billowing a blanket?
The casting challenges a few stereotypes. We tend to see Merlin portrayed as a snowy-bearded white guy in a conical hat: here Wyllie Longmore is a snowy-bearded black guy in a silver dressing gown. And though Way neglects to give him anything of real portent to say, he does have a wonderfully polished manner of announcing that he is Merlin, dreamer of perfect dreams - oh, he told you that already.
· Until January 22. Box office: 0161-236 7110.
