DAVID Walliams and children's theatre experts Birmingham Stage Company are proving ideal partners.

After Gangsta Granny, here is Awful Auntie, a typically exuberant Walliams story that has transferred to the stage full of wonder, wit, mystery, mirth and not a little manic mayhem.

Director Neal Foster has adapted Walliams's turbulent tale with the aid of a superb set and costume design by Jacqueline Trousdale, who conveys the rambling, creepy rooms of Saxby Hall in a series of 360-degree stairwells that house props, hiding places, chimneys and more besides and can be moved with ease.

Walliams's story opens with Stella Saxby (Georgina Leonidas) in bed at Saxby Hall, bandaged head to foot, waking up after three months, to be told by her awful Aunt Alberta (a cross-dressing Timothy Speyer) that her parents, Lord and Lady Saxby, have died in a car crash. Frightful, frightening Alberta wants her hands on the family pile, assisted by her very large, very scary owl Wagner (puppeteer Roberta Bellekom).

Stella needs an ally: step forward the cheeky-chappy chimney ghost Soot (Ashley Cousins), with his own back story that will be slowly revealed. Meanwhile, batty old butler Gibbon (Richard James) is in a highly entertaining world of his own, seemingly oblivious to what's going on around him in Walliams's story of frights, fights and friendship. James is terrific, his pratfalls recalling Martin Barrass's ancient waiter in Richard Bean's One Man, Two Guvnors.

Walliams has an eye for English eccentricity, typified by Speyer's Alberta, and he is a cracking storyteller too. Add witty puppetry and Awful Auntie really is awfully good.

Awful Auntie, Grand Opera House, York, tonight at 7pm; tomorrow and Saturday, 2.30pm and 7pm. Box office: 0844 871 3924 or at atgtickets.com/york