The Long Way Home, Guardian

Rural touring is one of the Cinderellas of British theatre. But village halls and tiny theatres up and down the country are packed most nights with people enjoying shows that arrive courtesy of the unsung hard work of touring networks and regional touring companies such as Eastern Angles.

The latter has reinvented itself over the last couple of years since the arts council threatened to chop its funding, but then relented. And, in Return to Akenfield, the company produced a show about East Anglian life that stood shoulder to shoulder with the very best verbatim work.

This latest piece, Charles Way's story of an old widowed Greek woman traversing the forests, farmlands and mountains to return to the seaside village of her birth, is charming and accessible. However, by choosing an off-the-shelf play Eastern Angles rob themselves of the opportunity to demonstrate that it is when they concern themselves with local issues that they are also at their most universal. With its timeless, almost fairytale quality, Way's play tries a little too hard to prove its universal relevance as the woman and her companion, a feral dog-child who she discovers in the forest and who she cares for as a lost son, cross the countryside.

Naomi Jones's production embraces Way's storytelling style, which is always at its most interesting and playful when it questions the nature of the story itself, and the opportunities that the teller has to manipulate the narrative. Mika Handley's simple design makes the most of the cramped space and plays with scale - miniature villages nestling amid an immense landscape. There are some lovely moments involving puppetry, with the woman and boy represented as tiny figures crossing great mountain ranges. Death is never far away: the woman's husband appears as a brilliant puppet ghost with an earthenware jug head.

Susan McGoun as the old woman is excellent, providing the drama with its quiet, grounded centre and some much-needed wry humour. The rest of the young cast work like dogs, quite literally in the case of Theo Devaney who plays the feral dog-boy.

The simplicity of the piece is appealing, and it would be all the more so if it wasn't so apparent that this fable comes with a staunch Sunday school lesson about the fences and borders we erect that stop us being truly human.

Lyn Gardner