After last month’s Into the Little Hill at the Oxford Playhouse comes another Pied Piper story – only this one has a more traditional look about it. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a joint production by the East Oxford Community Choir, Dugout Adult Community Dance and Oxford Youth Dance Groups, and there will be two performances at the Playhouse on Saturday. A new libretto and score by local composer John Duggan combines country dancing and choral singing to bring this age-old tale vibrantly to life.

“I’ve written three main choral pieces, which have a small amount of accompaniment or backing, and then the rest of it’s electronic,” explains John. “After the rats get piped out of town there’s a village fete, which starts off with the adults doing a staged country dance, then the kids burst in and do something much livelier – the music is a sort of mixture of Hawaiian and Scottish! I thought as it’s a fairy tale I could indulge in a certain amount of fantasy.”

Musically, John has tried to be as true to the tale’s original setting as possible. “I tried to immerse myself in the time. We don’t know a tremendous amount about early medieval times, but I read a bit about it and came up with the idea that life was very simple then in terms of the sounds that people heard. So I tried to work with a very limited palette, and give the music a flavour of medieval without descending into a kind of pastiche of the style.”

The main difference between this and the traditional version is that the story is told from the perspective of a little girl, Anna, the lynchpin of the story. “This little girl is born with one leg shorter than the other,” explains John, “so she can’t run and she gets left behind. There was the really thorny problem of how to end the tale, because it is fairly bleak. As it’s basically a children’s show, we didn’t want to create something that was too dark. So she has a dream in which she falls into the mountain and is reunited in her dream with her fellow children.”

A Pied Piper story with a happy ending? Now that’s a pied piper worth following.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin is at the Oxford Playhouse on Saturday at 4pm and 7pm. Box office: 01865 305305.