No matter how elaborate a present you give a little one this Christmas, they will more than likely be just as happy playing with the packaging. So it makes perfect sense that Sue Mulholland's show for under-sevens parcels actors and audience together in a big cardboard box (it's more magical than it sounds).
Inside we find a friendly, nocturnal crowd who introduce themselves as Shadowies – a Borrowers-like race who live in the cupboard under the stairs and whose movements are responsible for all the strange creaks and groans a house makes after bedtime.
They're also natural storytellers ("telling stories keeps them alive") and one of their favourites is the tale of a little boy who kept losing things – his dad's keys, his mam's glasses – and once, in a supreme fit of absent-mindedness, the morning when he tried to stay awake all night to wait for it.
Mulholland's tale plays on the strange, metaphysical transformation of a house once the lights are out and Chris Foley, as the Little Boy, captures the nervous excitement of venturing into a strange, prohibited world. Poised at the bottom of the stairs, he declares that it's "one small step for Mam, one giant leap for me".
Mark Calvert's direction is an inventive delight: there's a great musical encounter with the cats in the garden, in which everyone is invited to howl along, and a hilarious low-budget representation of floating in zero gravity. It will be interesting to see how long Andrew Stephenson's cardboard set holds up under all this activity, but for now it seems the perfect, all-round Christmas package.
Until 15 January 2011. Box office: 0191-230 5151.
