In the high and far-off times, o best beloved, a family watched a play of faraway lands, when the world was just beginning and was filled with djinns and funny creatures.

The Red Table production of the Rudyard Kipling Just So Stories was slick and performed by talented and energetic actors. The props and set were clever and imaginative – Pau Amma the crab made from umbrellas, the elephant child’s ever stretching nose from a slinky.

But for all the glory of Kipling’s originals, this transition to stage struggled to hold the attention of 250 children – the directly read stories seemed too dense, the language too thick and fast to make enough immediate sense to four and five-year-olds busy giggling about their popcorn-induced belches.

For all their inventiveness, the props were too subtle, a slinky not visible enough at the back of a theatre to a thirty-ahem-year-old, let alone the accompanying Smalls.

How The Camel Got His Hump, How The Whale Got His Throat, The Crab That Played With The Sea, and The Elephant’s Child are such familiar and fond stories to us grown-ups, it’s a huge impatience to share them with the next generation. But this felt as though we were only halfway through the story of How The Just So Stage Production Became.