The joy of childhood nightmares

I go to the theatre off and on - fairly erratically. So when someone told me I should see Shockheaded Peter when it opened at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1998, I went with a completely open mind.

It was described as a "junk opera" based on Heinrich Hoffman's cautionary tales for children, devised by Phelim McDermott, Julian Crouch with Martin Jaques's band, the Tiger Lilles, who I'd never heard of. I'd grown up with Hoffman's Struwelpeter and forgotten it. But the show brought back all those gleeful nightmares of childhood.

It reminded me of the circus sideshows I saw as a kid, only less disappointing - a truly grotesque world. We're in a Pollock's Toy Theatre. Here, children are punished and they die for being bad. There's no third way: the girl who plays with matches is burned to death; Struwelpeter, the unwanted, ugly child, is buried under the floorboards. It's just so nasty.

The creators use every trick in the book - puppets, grotesque make-up, elements of pantomime - to accentuate the horror. Martin Jaques's music weaves in and out, his voice like a knife, and the long-legged scissorman snip-snip-snips his way through. It harks back to older ways of doing theatre without being nostalgic - a cut-out world of characters that go beyond the reality you expect. In some ways it reminded me of my animations for Monty Python.

The show had the same effect on me as an adult that the stories had when I was a child. It's alive, and fresh and vicious, and the images have stayed with me. Fairy tales were always there as modes of transport that thrilled and transported and scared me, but let me come out safe on the other side. Today, we seem to be surrounded by bowdlerised versions of childhood stories, that have no power, no resonance: we're so scared of kids seeing things that might actually frighten them. But kids are much tougher creatures than parents think they are. Which is why I'm taking my 12-year-old son along when I see Shockheaded Peter again. If he were 10 or eight, I'd still take him. I'm determined that my children won't be protected.

I'm working now with Martin Jaques and the show's producer, Michael Morris, on an adaptation of Edward Gorey's work - stories with spindly, Edwardian drawings of strange and mysterious deaths: Amy, who fell down the stairs; Basil, who was eaten by bears. Like Hoffman, Gorey was trying to shake up a really moralistic, goody-goody time, and I think they both had a lot of fun doing it. The joy of the grotesque is something one has to keep fighting for. If our show works as well as Shockheaded Peter I'll be happy: I don't know anyone who's seen it that hasn't been excited. And it's a real kick in the ass to the West End.