Paradise regained

You are invited to a six-hour demonstration of the fiendish difficulties when Lyra, a 12-year-old girl, and Will, a boy from an alternative reality, embark on a mission to save the world from God and Christianity.

Since an armoured polar bear, ridiculous harpies, a 6in spymaster on a dragonfly and two camp angels are caught in the struggle, you may gather this is one of the most fearful assignments since Paradise Lost.

Philip Pullman's famous His Dark Materials trilogy, in Nicholas Wright's neat compression and under Nicholas Hytner's inventive direction, has returned to the National where last year it scored a big hit with young audiences. My second exposure left me regularly delighted by the ingenuity with which Pullman's imaginings are given theatrical life.

The trilogy plunges deep into magic terrain, to parallel worlds reached with a flick of Will's miraculous knife. It even takes a dangerous trip to the world of dead souls. The journey there, in a rowing-boat that literally floats into view through the dark air is spellbinding. The misty underworld, with its huge reflecting mirror and spectral figures, is almost as haunting as the vision of the rescue of the dead and their pantheistic return to life, where they fade into air and trees.

But I was battered by Wright's relentlessly over-packed, sometimes preposterous action-man narrative in which David Harewood's explorer, Lord Asriel, puts on shouting displays. There was scarcely pause before the next catastrophe at the hands of bears, witches, scheming Christians, John Carlisle's suavely menacing Lord Boreal or Mrs Coulter, Lyra's dissembling mother, whom Lesley Manville plays with serpentine guile. The drum stage hardly stops turning and belching up new sets.

However, Pullman's ambition is serious and cerebral. Inspired by Milton, Blake, Old English poetry and CS Lewis, Pullman concocts an epic for youngsters that dismisses organised Christianity as a brain-draining trick to burden its adherents with a stifling sense of sinfulness or sexual guilt.

Lyra, to whom Elaine Symons unkindly gives the accent and manner of a milk-maid, and Michael Legge's staunch, suffering Will, resemble a juvenile, thoroughly modern Adam and Eve, unashamed of sex.

This duo aims for a Paradise Regained but are doomed to stay in their separate worlds. Consolingly, Dust - Pullman's word for sparks of existence or consciousness - will be stopped from pouring out of the world.

The young will be unconcerned with all this theorising. Older humanists will be disappointed Pullman's attack on a torturing Church remains crudely off-target.

If the action irritates adults, there are always theatricality's varied attractions. Daemons - visible personifications of each person's soul - are represented by Michael Curry, the brilliant puppet designer, as animals wittily manipulated by masked ventriloquists. These, and His Dark Materials itself, light up the London stage.

His Dark Materials - Part 1