It's a familiar lament: "There's absolutely nothing on the telly tonight," cries Swift. The next line isn't exactly unusual either: "Nothing ever happens around here". Swift's partner has no suggestions to offer as he returns home after a day's work at a Bertie Rooster's Fried Chicken outlet.

But this being a play and not real life, things do soon begin to happen. A pair of earnest twitchers appears, hot foot in pursuit of a dodo. Actually they don't need to be all that hot foot, for the dodo cannot, of course, fly, and is naturally somewhat elderly. Soon more colourful and exotic birds appear: a giant specimen who cries "Ma-ha" in a 'theek' Russian accent, for instance, and a flamingo who is hot stuff on the trombone.

Cloudcuckooland has been created as a musical comedy for children by Stephen Sharkey (writer) and Alex Silverman (composer) for the Onassis Programme for the Performance of Greek Drama at Oxford University. Not surprisingly it's based, very loosely, on Aristophanes's The Birds. Quite a bit of panto is thrown in - there's a song for the audience to sing, bird movements to try out, and balloons to blow up. The balloons are used to build the city of Cloudcuckooland, in a scene that caused whoops of delight at the Saturday afternoon performance I saw. Helen Eastman directed a well-drilled, multi-skilled cast (Helen Cole, Leon Scott, Georgina Philip, Charles de Bromhead, Fiona J.Keats, Nick Kellington, and Dafydd Huw James), whose energy was infectious.

Understandably perhaps, writer Sharkey has shied away from Aristophanes's love of political satire, and replaced it with A Message. The birds are naturally furious to see that one of the humans fries chicken. To make the point that they have rights too, they decide to dump bird mess on humans all over the world. But, alas, this message is conveyed in such a preachy tone that it becomes as irritating as a white splat landing on a newly cleaned coat.