CHANGELING Productions are the extreme ironing of modern theatre.

Not content with simply staging tired old plays in tired old theatres, the County Durham company likes to mount unconventional productions in unfamiliar surroundings.

Next week, Changeling Productions make their Theatre Royal debut presenting a concert within a play in The Studio in David Napthine's Playing For Time.

"We like using different places with different associations. We've already done a play called Three Miles Away in swimming pools, starting off at Spennymoor Leisure Pool, where we found the lighting really played off the water; and we've performed Elevation on indoor climbing walls," says David.

"At Carlisle Cathedral we did a promenade performance of Dreams Of Beasts, a show inspired by the cathedral's misericords, which are carved beasts underneath the wooden seats. We were asked to create a large-scale piece of theatre with puppets, stilt walkers and dance music. We flew big griffin puppets through the cathedral and into the audience, and no-one expected it!"

In Playing For Time, musicians Gregory Pullen and David Murray or Duncan Brown will give a recital of Johann Sebastian Bach's three Viola da Gamba Sonatas, interwoven with Napthine's dramatisation of the unexpected and controversial friendship that blossomed between the middle-aged Bach and his young patron, Prince Leopold of Germany. Napthine himself will play Bach, opposite Carl Kennedy's Leopold

"I've written the piece in the style of a fugue, with three themes and a counterpoint, and the music and theatre bleed into each other," says David. "The framework is the relationship between Bach and Prince Leopold, a very unusual friendship that cut across age, social status, religion and expectations.

"At that time Bach was rated as an organist but was poorly rated as a composer. He'd just been imprisoned and he was poverty stricken, and he struggled to get work until he got the job as the Kapellmeister."

Bach's circumstances were not promising: he would be working in a Calvinist Court for a young patron with a domineering mother who hated music. "Bach thought, 'Well, it's a job, I'll take it', but Prince Leopold was a fine viola da gamba player with his own orchestra, and out of their friendship, Bach was allowed to explore the revolutionary ideas that became very well known works.

"He wrote the sonatas for Leopold to show off his playing skills, and Bach only left his post when Leopold married and his wife didn't like music. She liked him to be marching around with his soldiers. It took Bach a year to find another post and even then he was only third choice. He only got it because two dropped out! The play shows how he was hired and fired and treated appallingly, because he was just a jobbing musician, so we shatter the myth of his celebrity."

Playing For Time was commissioned for the Bishop Auckland Music Festival last year and has since been re-worked for showcases at York Theatre Royal and amid the trains at the National Railway Museum's annexe at Shildon.

"We're now very interested as a company to break into the music festival circuit, and we're delighted that Delma Tomlin from the National Centre for Early Music in York is coming to see the show," says David. "If she likes it, then hopefully the National Centre will be able to back us for future performances."

Playing For Time, Changeling Productions, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, Monday to Wednesday, 7.45pm. Tickets: £3.50 to £9 on 01904 623568.

Updated: 16:43 Thursday, March 31, 2005