LISTEN to the audience before the show and listen again at the interval. Aside from pantomimes, no company rivals Kneehigh for enthusiastic chatter, such is the excitement surrounding the shows of these maverick Cornish travelling players.

The Tin Drum is their 11th visit to the West Yorkshire Playhouse, this time in a co-production with the Leeds theatre and the Liverpool Everyman – as is the modern way – but it is every inch of the raucous stage a Kneehigh show. Emma Rice may have moved on to pastures London at The Globe, but her storytelling template lives on, like the pioneering vision of the late Jonathan Silver at Salts Mill.

Ever ambitious, Kneehigh take on the 500 pages of Gunter Grass's surreal, wild, anarchic novel from 1959, a task that requires writer Carl Grose to "hack a path through the Black Forest", in the words of a programme note. The result of all that hacking is a cautionary, highly political, highly topical folk tale for our divisive times, one guided by an admittedly unreliable Storyteller (Dom Coyote, who even controls a mixing desk) from his eyrie in a mental institution.

He watches on as Oskar, the grotesque puppet child who refused to grow up, exposes the rotten world, Nazism et al, with his glass-smashing voice, his persistent drum and his bitter heart.

Grose combines with director Mike Shepherd and composer/musical director Charles Hazlewood to tell Grass's story of love, hate, war and fizz powder with constantly moving burlesque actor-musicians, disturbing puppets, black-humoured cabaret and delirious songs with a satirical kick that echoes Brecht and Weill's operatic plays, applied with a psychedelic flourish by Hazlewood's ever watchable band.

Ghastly but glorious, warped and weird, beautiful yet brutal, The Tin Drum is apocalyptic storytelling of tornado impact.

The Tin Drum, Kneehigh/West Yorkshire Playhouse/Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse, at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until October 28. Box office: 0113 213 7700.