This re-telling of a Scandinavian folk-tale has a lot of emotional depth to it, thanks to a production that makes the most of its few professional performers and its amateur cast of students. Princess Fayra is not happy at court and given to roaming the woods. She meets a bear with a golden wreath that she covets, and he hands it over on condition that he can come and fetch her to be his bride. Perhaps surprisingly, she agrees to this, but finds to her delight that he is in fact an unhappy king, Valemon, cursed to be a bear by day and a man by night, as long as no human sees him. So she loves him for nearly a year in darkness, but, eventually, can’t resist lighting a candle to look at his face. Disaster! The curse is now forever, and only three days before the full year, when it would have been broken.

Anja Meinhardt (pictured here as she consummates her love with Valemon), is well known in Oxford for her dance and physical theatre talents, and makes a touching Fayra: a playful princess shattered by the tragedy she has precipitated.

Tanner Efinger overcomes the disadvantage of a slightly ludicrous bear-costume to give a powerful performance as Valemon, while the 22 girl students dance as a kind of Greek chorus; a backing-group to Fayra’s agony, a bamboo forest through which she plunges as she searches for her lost love.

Three narrators give us the thoughts of the main characters, who hardly speak. The script in these passages — six writers are credited — is often beautiful and poetic, with Jordan Saxby very moving in his impassioned interpretation of Valemon’s feelings.

All this is held together by singers and musicians on a variety of instruments, who add greatly to the atmosphere of a piece which, eventually, arrives at a happy ending.

The Barefaced Night is at the O’Reilly Theatre until Saturday.