If you go down to Mulgrave Woods, 2,000 acres of dense woodland that sits hard against the sea in the picture-book village of Sandsend in Yorkshire, you are in for a big surprise. The woods have been taken over by site-specific theatre specialists Wilson + Wilson to create a large-scale piece of promenade theatre that threads together some of the history of the estate - the 18th-century garden designer Humphrey Repton's interventions in the landscape in an attempt to create "a proper environment for civilised man", and the visit in the 19th century of Maharajah Duleep Singh - with the mythological tale of a wild child, thrown up out of the sea and lost on the land.
The first requirement is a stout pair of boots; the next, a stout constitution - it is quite a hike, despite the partial use of golf buggies to transport the audience around. Then, you just need to keep your eyes and ears peeled. Songs and entrancing melodies drift across the air; threatening hunters appear from nowhere in clearings and copses; a feral figure looms among the romantic tumbledown ruins of old Mulgrave castle; a coach and horse pulls up by a prattling brook. In a small glade you stumble across an Alice in Wonderland-style tea party, complete with a life-sized elephant.
With the environment doing so much of the work and providing such a beautiful backdrop, the show is nothing but a pleasure, even if the complications of the narrative and the diffuseness of the experience militate against real dramatic tension. It is only in the final moments, as a young man stumbles resolutely along the river and out to sea, that the piece acquires the emotional kick that has characterised this company's previous work. Even so, there is a real sense of having entered into a private and magical world, and of having seen, heard, smelled and felt something of the dark, secret, mysterious heart of the woods.
· Until July 3. Box office: 01947 602124.
