THE Legend Of King Arthur Experience is all about making a trip to the theatre more than just seeing the new Mike Kenny play.

Designer Catherine Chapman has transformed the terracing, foyer and backstage as well as the stage in order to create “York’s summer blockbuster for all the family”.

In the daytime, children can partake in the Knight School and heraldry workshop before being knighted on stage by Niall Costigan’s king-next-door Arthur.

From 12.30pm to ten minutes before shows start, you can undertake the King Arthur Quest – a word game with 19 clues – in the Tilt Yard (the terrace), the Refectory (the foyer), through Mint Yard Lane to the Great Hall (the stage), The Lake (backstage) and The Dungeon, home to the dragon. Look out for storytellers too.

However, the play still has to be the big draw here, no matter what the “Experience” around it is, and Mike Kenny’s quest is to continue his run of summer successes after The Railway Children, The Wind In The Willows and the York Mystery Plays.

Kenny opens in the present day as a young northern lad called Arthur becomes detached from a school outing to Jorvik and ends up pulling a sword from a stone. The sword, the stone. Whoosh, suddenly he is transported into the world of Merlin (Matthew Rixon), the narrator.

Arthur knows him off the telly, a reference that acknowledges Kenny’s play cannot operate in a cultural vacuum, hence a later scene that leaps into the world of computer games.

Likewise, Kenny believes you should treat a young audience no differently from an adult one, so he does not shy away from the Arthurian issues of incest (Arthur and Morgana’s baby), infidelity and lust.

He achieves the right tone, partly through his decision to have a matching cast of young leads and adult leads: on press night, Ross Hunter as Young Arthur, Laura Soper as Gwenevere, Tom Western as Lancelot and Naomi Halliday as Morgana, overlapping with Costigan’s Arthur, Sarah Vezmar’s Gwenevere, Peter Basham’s Lancelot and Michelle Long’s villain of the piece, Morgana.

Directed with a freedom to roam by Damian Cruden, this show has all the ingredients of a typical Kenny work – storytelling, socialist politics, a journey of discovery – plus a cast of actor-musicians; the off-the-wall weirdness of this spring’s iShandy; the knockabout spirit and social comment (and films) of a Berwick Kaler pantomime; and the musical irreverence of Monty Python’s Spamalot and the hippy airs of Hair, courtesy of composer Oliver Birch.

Add Michael Lambourne’s booming Sir Ector and even louder drumming; Mummers plays; a fire-breathing dragon; a cabbage-headed Green Knight; circus trapeze routines; and a speech by Viviane (Charlotte Gomer) that could have been plucked from Titania’s mouth in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and somehow, almost miraculously, it hangs together very enjoyably by the end: comedy and drama, mystery and myth; jousting and computer games.

Everyone’s quest, decides Kenny, is to “make your own destiny”. A hippy sentiment, frankly, but, hey, give it a go.

The Legend Of King Arthur/The Legend Of King Arthur Experience, York Theatre Royal, until August 31. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk