It may be only little, but under artistic director Steve Tiplady, the Angel is getting above itself - in the very best possible way. After the wonderful Jabberwocky, a visit by Improbable and collaboration with the RSC on Shakespeare's erotic love poem, Venus and Adonis, this Islington puppet theatre is fast staking a claim for itself as one of London's most interesting theatres.
This musical for children is a case in point. From Peter O'Rourke's wonderfully imaginative design of faded sunflowers and jumbled up newspaper headlines (as if a poison-pen letter writer with a taste for the absurd has gone berserk) to its witty ditties and klezma-style score, this is a truly original piece of work that conjoins two of Aesop's fables - The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse and The Lion and the Mouse - to make one story.
To be honest, the joins sometimes show, but the whole thing is done with such dash, such a sense of fun and such bold theatricality that you don't really mind. There is so much to enjoy here, from the seamless mixing of human actors and various puppets to a script that is quirky enough to offer the "rubbish truck of redemption" and the "Hoover bag of hope". There is a wonderful sequence where the lion, arriving in the city, confronts buildings constructed entirely out of newsprint and humans made from words - generally words such as "Ouch!" after he has devoured their legs.
The puppets all give remarkable performances; some of the humans are less assured. But once again Tiplady proves that puppetry - and children's theatre - have no boundaries except those we choose to impose upon them.
· Until January 23. Box office: 020-7226 1787.
