Drawing on the vast stock of literature from the Muslim world, Khayaal Theatre Company describes its storytelling-based theatre as "wisdom-orientated entertainment". As with fairytales, there are plenty of lessons to be learned from these four stories hailing from West Africa, Iraq, China and Iran. One of the pleasures is realising that one knows some of them in different forms.
I had come across the African Incey Witty Spider story of the arachnid who tricks the bigger jungle beasts into supplying her and her thousands of starving children with food many times before. On the way out of the theatre I met someone who told me a new version of the Chinese tale of the young man in search of enlightenment who finds the answers in his kindness to strangers on the journey to question the wise man of the mountain.
At the start of national storytelling week, Khayaal remind us that the oral tradition is alive and kicking, and that these ancient stories can still show us how to live. But while the stagings have a rough and ready charm, they are stuck in a time warp of the theatre of 20 years ago. They lack visual flair.
For much of this long evening - most of the adaptations would benefit from cutting - this feels like a superior school play with the emphasis too much on education and too little on the transforming possibilities of theatre. What magic there is comes from the power of the stories, not from the way they are presented. You wonder whether they might have been more potent if they had been told by a single storyteller, leaving the audience to use their imagination.
· At the Cockpit, London W2, until Saturday. Box office: 020-7258 2925. Then touring.
