TAKE the second draft, then straight on till morning, as prolific York playwright Mike Kenny adapts J M Barrie's Peter Pan for a second time in five years.

His first version was on the grand scale for a theatre-in-the-round production, directed by York Theatre Royal artistic director Damian Cruden in the main house in 2011 with the traditional Edwardian setting.

Move forward to 2016 and Kenny has reimagined Peter Pan for modern times, mobile phone and all, in the backyard of a very ordinary home of a very ordinary family, somewhere in the north, where the Darling children Wendy, Michael and John are camping out underneath a magical moon in an improvised Wendy house.

"It's my house, I make the rules," says Grace Lancaster's Wendy, through whose eyes the story of Peter Pan is re-told. She wants to be astronaut when she grows up and tonight might be the last time that she tells the story with her brothers as they build the house and use whatever comes to hand in the yard as props.

Returning to York after three years' training at Rose Bruford, the gifted singer, musician and actress Lancaster is joined by Jack Brett and Chris Draper, who play not only the brothers, but Lost Boys and pirates too, as well as Pan and Hook respectively as they zip through Barrie's story in 65 joyous minutes.

Ivan Stott's effervescent, gloriously dotty music, allied to Kenny's witty lyrics, adds another dimension, particularly in the Mermaids' song, for which the Darlings turn their sleeping bags into tails and transform themselves into a Supremes pastiche. Interestingly, these mermaids are naughty lasses, too cool for school as they sit at the back of a bus doing their nails. The pirates, meanwhile, serve up a yo-ho-ho hip-hop rap with dance steps and arm gestures to the max.

Kenny's storytelling for children aged three and upwards is as inventive as ever as he weaves in all the familiar characters, save for the family dog and, tellingly, Mr Darling, who is referred to as an absentee dad (it was ever thus in modern fractured families). Family matters in Kenny's tale, but so does individual expression in childhood, bucking convention as Wendy, rather than Pan, fights with Hook.

Kate Bunce's designs are suitably playful and imaginative, featuring a garden fence that transforms into roofs and lit-up windows; rakes for the crocodile's jaws; a garden tool for Hook's hook; torches for shadow play and a wheelbarrow for storage.

The stage keeps being reinvented, just as happens in child's play, and movement direction by Holly Irving is delightful for when Pan and the children fly and for Tinkerbell's tiny ball of light flashing from hand to hand, much to the wonderment of the enchanted young audience. This is magical, musical, moonlit theatre.

Underneath A Magical Moon, Tutti Frutti/York Theatre Royal, in The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until October 22, then on tour until December 31. York box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk