Let’s begin at the beginning: ‘Once there was a boy and one day he found a penguin at his door.’ In the opening pages of Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers, we meet a lost penguin and a young boy – not obviously despondent or unpopular, but alone at the door to his house, and in the series of illustrations that follows. As you turn the pages, you begin to understand that the lost little penguin is the boy’s only company.

‘The more I thought about the story, the more I came to realise that it clearly wasn't just the penguin that was lost’, says Will Brenton, BAFTA Award-winning co-creator of the Tweenies and Director of Factory International’s adaptation of Jeffers’ celebrated book. ‘I think the boy had the need of somebody as well.’ The reason for that need? It becomes obvious that the boy only has some disinterested seagulls and his yellow bathtub duck to talk to.

The importance of stories – for connection and communication – is Lost and Found’s central theme, both on the page and now the stage. ‘Storytelling is one of the most important creative outlets we have as humans’, Oliver Jeffers says. ‘A lot of people grow up and think they don't know how to look at art; they're not an artist, they can't draw. They forget that all human beings are born naturally as artists, and we just forget to continue creating as we become self-aware adults. But we learned how to read a room or read facial expressions, and we learned how to read or interpret an image before we even learned how to read a word. Storytelling is key as we learn to understand one another, understand the world around us.’

Brenton agrees: ‘They give us so much’, he says. ‘They give us a moral code to live by. They teach us about our interactions. They teach us about amazing worlds that we can believe in our imagination. You know, the power of it is kind of unparalleled really.’ Puppetry Director Olly Taylor, whose credits include Asteroid City, Star Wars and Teletubbies, states this even more simply: ‘The best way humans find to explore relationships and ideas is through story.’

There’s Gruff Rhys’ soundtrack, with its original lyrics, seafaring motifs and recordings of boat building. There’s a set formed from the lost items that get washed up on our shores – found plastics, mixed with marine objects – and dotted with hidden references to the story. Then there’s a puppet chorus of naughty seagulls that help with scene changes and interact like a squabbling family; a slapstick counterpoint to the quieter dynamic between boy and penguin. ‘One of the jobs is going to be making the characters genuinely interact with each other’, says Movement Director Jess Williams of bringing this ensemble to life.

The puppets, including the boy and penguin themselves, are where the audience truly become part of the storytelling. Created in model maker Jonathan Saville’s workshop, these gorgeous, characterful creations are nonetheless bound by mechanics; imagination does the rest. ‘The thing with puppets is the investment, because it's a dialogue and you're both investing in it’, Olly Taylor reflects. ‘It is really magical – magic not as a deception, but as the engagement of the imagination.’

‘The big difference with what we're doing with Lost and Found is it's not a kids’ show in the sense that it's people coming out being bright, energetic and shouting at the audience’, Brenton says, gesturing to the space they’re leaving to be filled with creativity. For him, this way of making theatre is missing something: he argues that the approach to a show should be driven by quality, not assumptions about its audience. ‘I would hope that more people pay attention to the idea that kids’ content isn't a bolt on’, Brenton suggests. ‘It's something we should cherish in the same way we cherish who teaches our kids – as we cherish who medically looks after them. We should cherish who entertains them.’

These are, after all, stories that can stay with us from early childhood, with the same significance as memories. We build our friendships with them – our entire idea of the world, really. Stories are our way into understanding our own and other people’s feelings, what we talk about when we talk about love – and a new way forwards together, whether journeying back from the South Pole, or on the way home from the theatre. And, as Jess Williams says, ‘they shouldn’t get less important to us as we get older’.

Lost and Found runs 12 December 2023 – 6 January 2024 at Aviva Studios. Images by David Levene.