ROALD DAHL meets Nosferatu is how Natasha Hodgson describes Kill The Beast’s take on The Boy Who Kicked Pigs.

“It’s a fast-paced, surreal, dark and bloody romp through the demise of this horrible little boy,” she says. “It’s like a Roald Dahl morality tale, all twisted and weird, with Nosferatu black and white projections and face paint.”

There might be people beating sharks to death, a motorway pile-up and a boy trying to poison his sister with weed-killer, but Hodgson says her company’s adaptation of the horror-fantasy penned by the Sussex-based former Dr Who actor Tom Baker is a family show.

“Although the show is horrid and has blood and guts and gore, we have had such a good response from families who have brought kids aged over 12 along.

“A lot of family theatre can be twee, but kids are horrible and they like getting each other in trouble. People will try to hide away from that but we celebrate it.”

In Baker’s creation, first published in 1999, 13-year-old oddball Robert Caligari takes his anger at the world (and his sister) out on pigs. He kicks them and enjoys it. One day he decides he’ll hurt humans instead. Before long he decides he wants to take over the world – and destroy it.

Hodgson and her three co-performers play more than 45 characters between them.

“It’s basically a non-stop show for us. There are lots of props and costumes and accent changes, but we have an amazing creative team, who have made beautiful costumes.

“At one point there is a policeman who is covered in fish and the costume is a work of art. The first time we saw their creations we thought: ‘OK, we need to up our game’.”

Getting Baker and his illustrator’s imaginations on stage using only four chairs has been the young company’s big challenge.

They have kept all the big set piece scenes and added “new depth” to the book to translate the story to stage. They’ve removed the narrator and commissioned a new musical score to add to the eerie feel.

“At times the book is complete chaos – apropos of nothing it cuts to a holiday park where there is a beach and a huge shark attack and a baying mob of beach goers who attack the shark – and it made us have to be inventive.

“We’d go – how can we do a coach load of vicars when you don’t have a film and an illustrator?

“Those sequences ended up being our favourite part of the show. It made us take the filmic and cinematic and push it and squeeze it on to a stage.”

Kill The Beast first performed its adaptation at The Lowry in Manchester. It was the first production by the five former Warwick University students who make up the company. Two years on from the Manchester premiere the show has run at Jackson’s Lane in London and at the Edinburgh Fringe.

The love for left-field theatre led the group to follow-up The Boy Who Kicked Pigs with a werewolf detective story they performed in Edinburgh in August this year called He Had Hairy Hands.

But Hodgson is happy to be returning to Baker’s wicked tale for two dates at The Old Market.

“When we created it all the decisions made sense in the logic of the play. But coming back to it now it seems even more mad, which is a good thing and makes us excited to put it on in front of fresh faces.”