The Girl With The Iron Claws is a neat piece of theatre. The performance we saw was a bit scant on audience, mostly because the evening was so sunny. All who were there seemed to be finding it enjoyable and impressive, the young and old.

The story is based on a Norwegian fairy tale about King Valemon, the White Bear King. It's a genuinely old story, not a modern lookalike, and it has the proper sort of motifs - three sisters, of whom the two elder are mean and vain while the little one is beautiful and fearless; magic implements; a king who is cursed to be a bear by day... but it also feels quite progressive, not least because it's a heroine who saves the day.

The performance is clean and straightforward, with touches of magic, managing to portray some impossible things like a glass mountain, and a long journey, on a small stage while making it all look easy. I think it was this aspect which put it furthest from the Panto bracket. The lighting effects were excellent, and there was skilful puppetry performed by all 4 cast members.

I think the sort of puppetry that's fashionable now is due largely to Philip Pullman, and the difficulty of portraying daemons on the stage. It's one of his least trumpeted achievements. From His Dark Materials it has migrated, and is now embraced by the RSC. It's no surprise that Rachael Canning, Puppet Director of The Girl With The Iron Claws, has worked on RSC productions. And King Valemon himself was certainly a bear of the Iorek Byrnison mould.

There's always a difficulty with this sort of show that the children in the audience will not cope with the darker elements. There were certainly parts of the performance that made me jump, mostly involving chief baddy the Troll Queen. She was pretty alarming both dispensing curses and receiving her comeuppance. But the children in the audience seemed to take it all in their stride, finding her more funny than scary. I took this as a reminder that children are more hardy than they look, and that fairy tales are a very good way to explore fear and villains in safety.

The Wrong Crowd are inventive, entertaining, neat but still eerie and wild in the right places. In short they're excellent story-tellers. Although they're not performing again in Oxford in the near future their tour carries them quite close in the coming months. For dates, check our their website.