Director Nick Bligh believes his latest production is as much for children as it is for adults ? despite its allegorical nature.

The audience is forewarned that ?In the Woods? is not a pantomime. Although at times it is very happy and light there is very dark material as well. Mr. Bligh said: ?You definitely have to engage your brain ? you really need to come and get involved with the characters and hopefully at the end you go out up lifted and thoughtful.?

Mr. Bligh said the play is about all the fairy tale characters that you know about, like Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Bean Stalk, Cinderella, the Witch and the Wolf.

He said: ?They all meet in the woods. Cinderella wants to go to the ball so she goes to visit her grandmother?s grave for her wish to be fulfilled.

?The characters clash and come together in a very unusual and rather chaotic and ultimately sad disastrous waste.

?In the first half it is pretty much the way you would imagine a fairy tale to be and everyone perceives their wish and it appears to be a happy ever after. They go through an awful lot to achieve it after they had crossed each others paths and the witch permeates the story.?

Mr. Bligh said every character has a wish, Cinderella wishes to go to the ball, Jack wants to keep his cow, and Red Riding Hood wants to see grandmother.

?There have also been two new characters created for the musical, the Baker and the Baker?s Wife, who represent your typical Joe, and their wish is very simple ? they just want a child. So the witch sends them on an errand to the woods to make a potion that will make her young and beautiful again.

?So all these things occur and it is very, very complex and it is very hard to tell you without giving away the second half. Because the second half is the flip side of the coin and all of the things that they achieve have done damage.

?They have had to lie, to beg, to borrow, to aggressively pursue their dream and they have caused damage to their environment and their moral status. So the second half is the moral repercussions to them achieving their goals in the first half. The world unravels and becomes quite chaotic like the world we recognise today and any deed, however benign, has some outcome and often you cannot determine when you have committed the act.

?I am being coy here because I don?t want to completely give away the second half.?

The stories within ?In the Woods? are fairy tales and the show is very family oriented.

But he said: ?It is allegorical and by that, it has two strands to the story. It is a bit like Gulliver?s Travels or any fairy tale and on the surface read the child will enjoy the fantastical journey that the characters goes through, the tasks they have to achieve, the hurdles they have to get over.

?But the adult reading the story to the child understands the deeper meaning, for instance Little Red Riding Hood, it is a fantastic allegory.

Here is a little girl who takes a journey and she meets a wolf, she gets eaten.

?So it seems to be a cautionary tale about when you meet a stranger, but

it is not at all. It is really about this Little Red Riding Hood, the red reflecting her menstrual blood because she is coming of age and the path she takes is to adulthood because at the end of the path is grandmother, who successfully negotiated a life, so she is to pass to being a grandmother if you like.

?On the way she meets a wolf, who represents a seductive or a dangerous man and it is the introduction into the world of man. And when she gets to grandmother?s she finds that the wolf has eaten her and he then eats her and then of course the wood cutter turns up, the honourable man ? a possible mate for Little Red Riding Hood.

?We didn?t have a very simple story, there are all sorts of rules and ways of negotiating the world of allegories.?

He said so when the audience comes to see the show, they will see that it is very child friendly and a bit of slapstick, but the situations are very real, very immediate and a lot of danger.

?Children on the surface will enjoy it, but parents will see the deeper meaning ? it is not trivial or silly,? he said.

Mr. Bligh said the second act becomes very dark and it is the flip side of the ?I Wish? mentality.

?In some ways it is similar to Arthur Miller?s ?Crucible?, which is based on the Salem witch hunts and witch trials, during which people were persecuted for being witches, which is fantastical really,? he said, ?But it was an allegory of what was happening during the McCarthy witchhunts, the committee for un-American activities in the 1950s and Arthur Miller appeared on them.

?So in many ways ?Into The Woods? ? without putting people off ? is probably closer to the allegory of the ?Crucible? rather than the cheesy Disneyfied fairy tales, because unfortunately Disney waters down the allegorical nature of the stories and makes them a very simplistic tales with a very basic moral.

?So I like to say the stories appeared from 1400 to 1900 when many people were illiterate when these stories were spoken because it was an oral tradition. Children would have listened to them and detected the subtleties of allegory of symbolism. So many things that of course ? even though we are better educated today ? we are so wearied by television, computer games and we don?t need them in the same way.?

Mr. Bligh said he got into theatre when he was young and has not looked back since.

?Well I was very sporty and I got involved with some theatre sports when I was a teenager in a youth theatre,? he said, ?And I read drama and theatre at London University and I did post graduate training in acting. I worked as an actor for a couple of years, but I always loved directing so I got out.

?So I started a theatre company and started doing shows. I began to get a reputation for doing Sondheim and the Gilbert & Sullivan Society know of me coming over to work with the Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society, because I did a couple of shows there.

?The first show that I did with BMDS, was a show that I had in London, and I have a great association with Sondheim. He was a very great story teller using music. I have a desperate need for music. It sort of bypasses all of our filters, our intellect and it goes to the root of what is primal. If you got to a football match and they aren?t happy with the referee, they don?t shout it, they sing it. And if you go to an opera, people are receiving music. Although they are miles away in class, both need music. So story telling to music is fantastic and I love that.?

Mr. Bligh works mainly in London although he has did shows in the Big Apple as well.

?I did a show in New York last year and I have also been to Rome, which is

very nice ? a bit of travelling with work,? he said.

?It is really nice because directing is really hard work and there is a lot of competition in the arts ? there are a lot of very talented people.

It is a really great show to work on and the people here are really charming and very accommodating and there is a lot of talent on the Island as well.

?You must have five professionals in the company at least, we have Phillip Barnett, Nancy Thompson, Mark Durrill and Barbara Frith.

Also Nancy?s daughter Paige Thompson is playing Little Red Riding Hood and Allison Evans is playing Cinderella a really good talented group and these are just the names I can remember.