Ian Brown’s delightful revival of Adrian Mitchell’s version of C. S. Lewis will doubtless be sending many of the watching kids hot-footing to any wardrobe still to be found in the age of built-in cupboards. If so, it says much for their imagination and spirit of adventure, but less for their good sense. Narnia, the country on the other side, is governed by a female counterpart of the dictator Lewis must have had in mind when he wrote the original book soon after the Second World War.

That is signalled from the very start: the monitors above the stage show German bombers and burning London streets, and the four Pevensie children arrive on stage in 1940s macs with labels identifying them as evacuees. And then, with the speed and simplicity that marks the production throughout, we are in the house belonging to Neil Salvage’s wise, rumpled and generally Lewis- like Professor Kirk — and Amy Brown’s appealing young Lucy has found her way through his old wardrobe and, magically, into Narnia.

Here is a country where it is always winter yet never Christmas, where it is not safe to trust trees as they may be eaves-dropping spies, and where arrest, imprisonment and worse await brave or unwary inhabitants such as Danny Seldon’s Mr Tumnus, the fussy, flummoxed faun who first greets Lucy. And when we meet the ruler herself she is no letdown. As played by a magnificent Clare Foster, the White Witch is a scarily seasonal blend of every menacing, gloating stepmother, with bits of Cruella de Vil thrown in. She even has her personal Goebbels in tow: Ben Sewell’s dwarfish, scuttling Grumpskin.

Those who have read the book or seen the film will know what ensues after Lucy has persuaded her siblings to transform themselves into a Famous Four, or, since Stefan Butler’s flabby Edmund has been lured into the clutches of the White Witch with promises of Turkish delight, a Thrilling Three. Mr Tumnus has disappeared and his house has been trashed by the Gestapo of the witch, but Mr and Mrs Beaver are able to get the children an audience with Aslan the Lion, which, in Louis Decosta Johnson’s performance, is as shaggily majestic a jungle king as ever paired with a unicorn.

Could Narnia the place be more exotically evoked and the final battle between Hitlerite evil and leonine good be more ferocious? Perhaps; but by the denouement, Brown’s production has achieved the important thing, which is to keep stakes and tension high. And Lewis’s symbolism — Aslan rising from the dead et al — is far from tilting the piece into didacticism.

Unlike Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which crudely travesties Christianity as a murderous amplification of Opus Dei, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe makes no attempt to colonise children’s minds, hearts or souls. On the contrary, it is what Joseph Pitcher’s prefect-like Peter and the other Pevensie kids would call it in their period way: a spiffing adventure and a jolly good treat.

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