By Maura Bowman at St Andrews

CHRISTMAS SHOWS are undeniably tricky for theatres to pull off.

Should directors go all-out to hold the children’s attention with familiar stories and lots of audience participation, play more to the adults in the audience, or try to do both and run the risk of falling between two stools?

In the past, I confess, I have found the Byre Theatre’s Christmas productions a little too clever for its own good. Lovely to look at, stylish and stylised, but lacking the good nature and energy needed to foster that rosy glow we all want to feel as we head back out into the dark, winter streets of St Andrews.

In The Marsh King’s Daughter, however, they have found an unlikely treat for the festive season.

I say unlikely because the play is based on a complicated and little-known story by Hans Christian Andersen, which weaves the action between Scandinavia and Egypt.

Pharaoh’s daughter Halima is tricked by her two wicked sisters and ends up being kidnapped by the northern Marsh King.

They have a daughter, Helga, who is taken in by a woman desperate for a child. However, Helga has been cursed and bears a terrible secret, which must be kept hidden even from her Viking foster father.

The story can be considered on a number of levels and has elements familiar from many other folk tales.

The dialogue in this adaptation by Rita Henderson and Stephen Wrentmore, who also direct, is not always smooth and the simple staging may not please the more sophisticated theatre-goer, while the “moral” tacked on the end is unnecessary.

In addition, musical director Robert Pettigrew’s songs are trite and soulless.

They add nothing and, with the exception of an entertaining little ditty about the attractions of life on The Banks of the Great River Nile, you won’t remember any of them 10 seconds after the last chord dies away.

But for the children and, I suspect, most of the adults in the audience, these deficiencies are easily over-looked because this is a good story, well told by a talented cast.

Justine Balmer and Geoff Hennessy manipulate the stork puppets that act as narrators, effectively re-capping the more complicated parts of the plot.

With members of the youth cast as their fledgling family, they also provide humour in the piece, lightening the mood of what could be a pretty dark tale.

When the lights went up, one young theatre-goer announced, “I’d go and see that again.”

Given the size of the audience on the night I was there, I think it’ll be a shame if more people don’t go and see it a first time.

The Marsh King’s Daughter runs until December 31.