“STOKE the flames and carve the meat, Little boy tastes oh, so sweet!” chants the witch in Kneehigh Theatre’s surprisingly dark version of Hansel and Gretel.

We are kept waiting for this disturbing character until the second half of the show, with just a tantalising glimpse before the interval.

Then she’s suddenly dancing about the stage in a nightie and gents’ carpet slippers, her distended stomach and false breasts drooping with age.

“Things are not what they seem,” sings the witch’s pet bird.

And this is as true of the play as of the children’s terrifying adventure as they try to escape the vision in satin who is planning to eat them.

Carl Grose (the show’s writer) visibly delights in playing this grotesque childeater, a major contrast to his other role of the congenial father.

Despite this being, at its core, a story of child neglect, Kneehigh manages to make the traditionally hard-hearted parents sympathetic.

The decision to abandon their children in the forest is shown as madness brought on by hunger in an unforgiving world.

Driven to charming worms for tea with a set of bagpipes, Giles King as Mother and later as The Bird, in black leggings and winklepinkers with a puppet on his head, appears to always be teetering on the edge of sanity.

His performance is only upstaged by the puppets – a pair of singing rabbits and Diane and Maureen who are Coronation Street’s Rita and Emily in chicken form.

But it’s the set that clinches the gold medal – lengths of rope, old buckets, a gardening fork and other paraphernalia that Gretel, an amateur inventor, uses to create ingenious contraptions in front of your very eyes.

Laura Davis