A new play with songs from children's champion, poet and playwright Adrian Mitchell is cause for celebration enough, but when it has been specially commissioned by a new £2.6m performing-arts centre for children and young people, then we jolly well ought to rejoice. The Dream Factory may be stuck with a rather Disney-esque name but what goes on inside is intimately connected to the everyday lives of young people.
Mitchell's play, inspired by the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, who falls in love with the Scandinavian Princess Alysoun, whom he is taking by sea to marry his master, King Andrew the Bold of Scotland, is a diverting piece of work. Its fantastical subject matter is given full rein in a neatly stylised production, with a cast of more than 70 playing everything from time travellers to hairy trolls and courtiers on stilts. Never for a moment do you feel what you are seeing is a glorified school play. This is the Christmas present of one artist, Mitchell, to fellow artists and the fact that most of them are under 18 is just by the by.
True, by setting it in Scotland, Mitchell has posed his young cast some difficulties with accent, but most cope well and there are dividends to be had from the wit the dialect imparts. As one of the characters declares: "The year is 1342 or mebbe it's 1432, who cares, the whisky is brilliant." The songs are pretty good, too - folksy numbers with a real old Scottish feel that are performed with the minimum of accompaniment.
The play does meander about a bit, but when it gets down to telling its story of the huge luxury liner built to transport the princess and her retinue and said to be unsinkable, it does so with real power and an eye for the symbolic meanings of the story.
It is altogether a far wilder, more subversive and very different kind of theatre from Mitchell's adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which is playing a stone's throw away in Stratford upon Avon.
Until January 9. Box office: 01926 419555
