FIRST the bad news. Kneehigh Theatre's flying visit to Leeds ends all too son with a sold-out show tonight, only a few tickets still available for tomorrow's matinee and none for the evening show, just as was the case for earlier performances too.

Such is the buzz that always surrounds this Cornish travelling troupe, three bus loads of Yorkshire schoolchildren filling up most of last night's audience.

We are more used to seeing Kneehigh in the bigger Quarry theatre, most recently with a typically vivid reimagining of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum last October, directed by Mike Shepherd.

The Flying Lovers Of Vitebsk forms their 12th show at the Leeds theatre, this one a revival of former Kneehigh artistic director Emma Rice's production, here staged up close in the Courtyard theatre.

Russian-French artist Marc and writer Bella Chagall are the flying lovers of the title, partners in life and on canvas, frozen in frame as the picture of romance. Daniel Jamieson's 90-minute play, however, has them "walking through some of the most devastating times in history", taking in the Bolsheviks, Nazism and the Holocaust and exile in New York: a tumultuous whirl of world wars and revolution, reflected in Chagall's radical art that was first inspired by his home town of Vitebsk.

Wonderful actors Marc Antolin and Daisy Maywood, pianist, composer and music director Ian Ross and cellist James Gow, their faces painted white, clothes echoing Chaplin, Keaton and Waiting For Godot, as well as Chagall's paintings, combine Kneehigh's trademark skills of fluid storytelling, evocative musicianship, beautiful yet disturbing imagery and magical lighting and set design.

Here the tone is a slow-burning lament in a story of love, loss, exile and the survival instinct, where the Russian-Jewish-inspired music and dancing add to the pain of the brutality that consumes the lovers.

The Flying Lovers Of Vitebsk, Kneehigh Theatre/Bristol Old Vic, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, tonight at 7.45pm; tomorrow, 2.30pm and 7.45pm. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or at wyp.org.