IT WAS cunning, tactically, to open the all-new National Theatre of Scotland in ten places at once last month, diffusing attention but pulling in thousands more people than would ever have seen one big gala in Edinburgh or Glasgow.

Sooner or later, though, there was always going to come a moment when all eyes would be on one place, one stage, one big moment.

This production is it. Anyone expecting some grand classic, however, or even a new play by a Liz Lochhead or a David Greig, still has not grasped how different this national-theatre-without-walls — no permanent company, no permanent home — wants to be. Who else would have taken a story by Neil Gaiman, the graphic novel supremo, and got him to adapt it, a first in itself? Who else would have chosen a show for a family audience (“anyone from six upwards who’s not a scaredy-cat”, according to the publicity)? Who else would have had it almost entirely sung through to some stylish but dark, original music by Nick Powell?

Well, in the end, as long as it works, who cares? Happily, I can report that, although it takes a while to get going, its action-packed 75 minutes ends in something close to triumph. The story, originally a dream of Gaiman’s four-year-old daughter, is that there are wolves living in the walls of her ordinary house. Lucy, charmingly played and sung by Frances Thorburn, is more like 10 or 11 here, though naturalistic details do not count for much in this fantastical world where Mum makes jam and Dad plays the tuba. Naturally, Lucy turns out to be right. But when they finally appear, everything does not come to a stop, as the adults predict. The wolves turn out to be scaredy-cats themselves, just a bit raucous and badly behaved.

You could find any number of subtexts — about vanquishing fears, embracing strangers, living cheek by jowl — if you wanted to. But the real pleasure here is the sheer theatrical fun of it, the moveable, transparent walls of the house, the crazy projections and perspectives and, above all, the wolves themselves. Grey, mangy tatterdemalions they may be, giant puppets brilliantly manipulated by onstage puppeteers, yet somehow there remains something inescapably lupine about them.

Julian Crouch co-directs alongside Vicky Featherstone, the theatre’s artistic director, and you can see the hallmarks of Crouch’s own Improbable company, with which this is co-produced, all over it. But then Crouch grew up in Ayr, so already the NTS is bringing its talent home. My eight-year-old assistant reviewer was enraptured.

Until April 8, then at the Lyric, Hammersmith, April 12-29, and touring Scotland until May 20.