MUCH excitement surrounds cutting-edge theatre company Gecko making their York Theatre Royal debut with Missing, the Suffolk company's longest-running hit show.

As with the work of Cornish company Kneehigh, Gecko have the ability to draw young audiences to their dramas, and where Kneehigh are thrilling storytellers as well as innovative theatre makers, Gecko entrance with the mystery and magic and mellifluous flow of their experimental work.

Missing was created by company founder Amit Lahav, who was born in Israel to a musician father, who played the Tel Aviv hotels, and a go-go-dancing North Londoner mother. Hebrew merged with East London in his upbringing, and his theatre style is similarly international. As many as seven languages interact in Missing, to go with puppetry, stylised choreography, haunting children's song and original music by Dave Price.

Lahav's cast are as much dancers as actors and Missing never stops moving, with conveyor belts, a revolving disc, breathtaking lighting and disorientating sound design adding the unsettling, warped atmosphere of this psychological drama about a woman's decaying soul, where Lahav ponders what is romanticised, what is forgotten, in our recollections of childhood.

The multiple languages may be a barrier for some, but the spellbinding physical language is the strongest as Lahav considers how identity and memory interact and how childhood images shape who we are. To miss Missing would be a mistake; poetic, poignant theatre this original and groundbreaking rarely travels this way.

Gecko in Missing, York Theatre Royal, until Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk