The Pit: The Fahrenheit Twins

Hansel and Gretel are reinvented in a winter wonderland in Told by an Idiot's wayward but adorably tactile staging of Michael Faber's chilling coming-of-age story. The co-founders of this ever ingenious company, Hayley Carmichael and Paul Hunter, play a pair of semi-feral arctic twins, whose anthropologist father sends them off on a wild goose chase into the snow with the corpse of their loving mother, recently deceased in mysterious circumstances. Togged up in white fluffy suits, the twins (who are more light-hearted than their meaningful monikers, Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain, would suggest) romp ambiguously over Naomi Wilkinson's white furry playground of a set ñ now a sled, now a giant snow slide, now a cosy igloo, now a cruel altar to put out the eyes of an arctic fox. Carmichael and Hunter are sweetly metamorphic too in what, at its best, is a rite of passage fable with a frosty bite to it: our two human cubs tumble over into being sled dogs, their own parents, and even a pair of champagne-swigging arctic foxes in the curiously slinky interludes between scenes.

Under Matthew Dunster's fluent and sensitive direction, Carmichael and Hunter flicker through the twins's animal and adult identifications as suggestively as shadows on snow. They are in-betweeners, on a sled ride from innocence to experience, whose many playful improvisations distract from its tragic and exhilarating trajectory. It's only in the last half hour that their story matches the pace of their shape-shifting: they are eventually pinned down in an adult knowledge of the world that is tawdry because it stems from their father's betrayal of them. Told by an Idiot spend too long lovingly depicting the naÔve, cruel and joyful supposes of their childhood ñ but when adulthood's this tainted and unmagical, it's hard to blame them.