The Incredible Book Eating Boy is the latest offering from Bootworks Theatre Collective who are taking on Oliver Jeffers’ award-winning picture book of the same name.

Adapting a children’s book for the stage marks the company’s first foray into children’s theatre and provides a new, and surprisingly fitting challenge for the company’s artistic director, James Baker. “Children’s books, through necessity, cut straight to the action. They need to pack lots of information and narrative into a limited number of pages. This sense of immediacy appeals to us as we make short, energetic performance works that conform to similar ideas,” he explains. “Oliver’s visual vocabulary is extremely distinct and evocative so we’ve tried hard to stay faithful to the original book and have made attempts not to labour the story unnecessarily.”

Bootworks learned more through trial and error than anything else in the creative process: “Children were invited into early rehearsals to see what worked and what fell down, but there doesn’t seem to be a formula,” adds James. The key, he thinks is “to create something that parents can share with their children. If you think of your favourite story as a child, it is likely to be something that you still admire as an adult. Good kids’ stories somehow transcend across ages.” This attempt to pitch the show at a level appealing to children and adults alike is clearly working; James is currently in Egypt developing Arabic translations of the show for a theatre festival in Cairo.

In a story that revolves around a boy who has an insatiable appetite for books, keeping the focus on books themselves is obviously vital. And The Incredible Book Eating Boy, part of the Oxford Playhouse’s Playhouse Plays Out series, leaves the traditional theatre setting to arrive at Barefoot Books in Summertown. “We’ve always felt more comfortable performing outside traditional spaces,” says James. “We started in outdoor arts and have since made work in spaces from foyers to boxes.

“We’ve also toured orphanages, street corners, muddy fields and children’s hospitals. What we like about working outside theatres is that sometimes it attracts audiences that wouldn’t have found it otherwise.” Instead of playing out in a standard fashion, the show is performed to one child, and an accompanying adult, at a time. With a running time of just five minutes, it is a totally immersive and wildly innovative production that draws on the joy of a live experience. But why did Bootworks decide to perform the play to only one child at a time, surely a risky strategy? “Because that’s the least economically viable, most difficult, ridiculous idea we could come up with but, touch wood, it’s going OK,” James laughs.

Whilst a lot of theatre thrives on the shared experience, The Incredible... hopes to create the organic response of one-on-one storytelling. “The children share the experience with their parent so, in a sense, the experience is still about sharing, but we wanted to replicate a parent reading to a child in the hope it encourages the sharing of stories post-performance at home.

“Children’s work can often play to quite huge audiences, which is great for things like mass interaction. This show is just for you and your child, though. “Five performers work hard to bring this story to life.” The show manages to pack in puppetry, animation and projection to create what is a cinematic and, despite its brevity, epic piece of live performance. “Watching the show is a bit like watching a short film in the way it moves,” adds James. “It’s fast and heavily informed by image, scale and perspective which appeals to young audiences who are increasingly literate in terms of film and television.” Bootworks has succeeded in winning the stamp of young approval but James reveals the most surprising reaction. “Oliver Jeffers, who wrote the book, flew his brother to see the show in Edinburgh [it premiered at the Fringe Festival in 2011] and he said he thought it was better than Oliver’s book. That might just be sibling rivalry though,” he jokes.

But how much is the play’s five-minute duration down to maintaining a child’s short attention span? “It’s a fallacy that children have a short attention span. Much like adults, they stay attentive as long as something is engaging. The only difference is they have yet to learn the mechanisms to feign interest,” he laughs. “That’s what I like about kids – they’re honest.” Barefoot Books, Summertown Until April 12 Tickets: 01865 305305 or oxford playhouse.com