HOW well do you know the nursery rhymes of childhood?

Running from Monday to tonight, The Damask Room offers an adult reinterpretation of familiar tales and a Japanese one too, exposing the dark underbelly that lurks beneath the surface of often jolly bedtime reading before Lights Out.

Matthew Wignall has re-used the template that worked so well for his Five Seasons show in the back room of the According To McGee gallery, with five directors, a company of ten players and a series of short plays.

Last time Wignall wrote them all; on this occasion, he has been joined by Anna Rose James, Janice Simpson, Max Gee, Anna Rogers and Jo Wragg, to the sound-design accompaniment of Alexander King.

The flat rows of seating in Krumbs Kitchen lead to a restricted view of anyone performing below chair height on a stage of multiple boxes, but this is an improvised theatre space, a café, in the spirit of pub theatre, with the half-time perk of sweet things to nibble.

The focus on the dark side leads to an absence of light and shade in the vignettes, but this is pretty much unavoidable, given that so many nursery rhymes are not exactly a bundle of joy.

Some pieces are cloudy and elusive, with echoes of Pinter and Beckett, but those that work best, like Anna Rogers' How Jack Fell Down...And Jill Came Tumbling Down, have a bleak, macabre, twisted humour that gives them a new punch.

None more so than Jo Wragg's Woman In Shoe, written in rhyming couplets, which has a new layer of social comment on seemingly reckless single motherhood and scrounging that then rubs against the grain of stereotyping.

Natalie-Clare Brimicombe has the busiest night among the cast in myriad roles that could give her sleepless nights as nursery rhymes turn to nursery crimes.

The Damask Room, Off The Rock Productions, Krumbs Kitchen, Tanner Row, York, tonight at 7.30pm. Box office: ticketsource.co.uk/offtherockproductions