The Watermill Theatre is offering a welcome alternative to the pantomimes filling most other venues over Christmas with a colourful and hugely entertaining production of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach.

With a script supplied by the ever-reliable David Wood, the show is presented in what has now become the Watermill’s trademark style, with the multi-talented cast performing the musical numbers with a range of instruments on stage.

While there is nothing in the story that is remotely Christmassy, it nevertheless possesses a feelgood factor – certainly by the end – ideally suited to the festive period.

At its centre is the engaging figure of young James (Nadim Naaman) who becomes an orphan after his parents are attacked and eaten by a rhinoceros in London’s Regent Street. Yes, bizarre aspects of the plot rather cause one to wonder whether Dahl had not dabbled with some mind-altering substance to stimulate the creative process.

Initially, he is brought up by two greedy and selfish aunts, Spiker (Tomm Coles) and Sponge (Loveday Smith), who subject him to indignities of almost Dickensian dimension in their unpleasantness.

Help is at hand, though, when a giant peach appears in the garden, and James ventures inside it to discover, living in the stone, an assortment of oversize insects and other animals all very eager to become his friend.

They are the cultivated and violin-playing Old-Green-Grasshoppper (Ian Harris), the lovely Ladybird (Loveday Smith), the very pleased-with-himself Centipede (Tomm Coles), the depressed and doomy Earthworm (Robert Maskell, with a droll Brummy accent) and Miss Spider (Michelle Long) whose ability to spin tough threads proves useful more than once in the story.

It is thanks to her, for instance, that the peach – by then in the middle of a transatlantic crossing – can be hoisted skywards by a flock of seagulls to escape the attentions of a school of killer sharks.

As all this suggests, director Anna Linstrum and her creative team are presented with not a few technical demands in telling the story. Happily, all are met with considerable ingenuity before we reach the end of the tale with a ticker-tape welcome in New York City.

Lasting just 90 minutes with interval, the show is a joy throughout. The youngsters around me in the stalls last Saturday afternoon were clearly captivated by it.

Until January 3. Tel: 01635 46044 (www.watermill.org.uk)