It functions on a smaller scale, but the Cambridge-based touring company Hoipolloi ranks with Kneehigh Theatre as a group with a genuine desire to connect with its audiences. Like its older Cornish counterpart, Hoipolloi offers work that is clever, accessible and engaging, as Shon Dale-Jones’s adaptation of Edward Gorey’s 1957 book, The Doubtful Guest, proves.

Gorey, who died in 2000, was an eccentric American author, illustrator and cult figure whose precise, darkly humorous rhyming tales were accompanied by drawings possessed of a similarly macabre charm.

Dale-Jones (Hoipolloi’s artistic director) and a team headed by the actress-designer Stefanie Müller have transferred the quaint look and archly skewed tone of Gorey’s creepy-cosy work to the stage with the same kind of eager-to-please, self-referencing DIY invention that characterised the recent and endearing Hoipolloi productions Floating and Story of a Rabbit.

This new show is a stylised, tongue-in-cheek, Victorian-Gothic period piece about the Bishops, a pale, hollow-eyed and peculiar family of five whose ordered, tranquil domesticity is severely disrupted by the inexplicable arrival of an uninvited visitor – not a person but a nameless, mysteriously silent and furry creature with a beak, striped scarf and canvas shoes. It also possesses a string of oddball and ill-mannered habits (such as plate-eating, towel-hiding, doorway-blocking and so on) that gradually drive the Bishops round the bend.

Gorey’s undesirable guest can be interpreted several ways: as a mischief-making manifestation of this family’s emotional repression, say, or a test of its (in)ability to tolerate change or difference. To judge by the audience’s steady giggles, the hairy, dodo-like being that takes up residence is also a source of comedy, pure and simple.

There is an ironic innocence to the way that this awkward, hysteria-inducing and nonsensical situation is handled that any child could grasp immediately. Little wonder that Hoipolloi’s likeable, user-friendly performance has been deemed suitable for eight-year-olds and above. It operates in a state of gently sinister postmodernism. The Bishops take turns narrating, in an overenunciatory fashion, and re-enacting their portentous story, underlining the theatricality of the enterprise in a physically expressive manner that echoes Victorian melodrama.

All in all, it’s a playful, accomplished piece of nonsense, and I mean that as a compliment.

Tour continues: Everyman Theatre, Liverpool (0151-709 4776), March 25-29; New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich (01473 295900), April 3-5; Northern Stage, Newcastle (0191-230 5151), April 8-12.

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