There won’t be a dry eye — or a dry anything — in the Burton Taylor Studio from next Friday, if director Toby Hulse has anything to do with it. That’s because, after a successful week’s trial there earlier in the year, he’s bringing back his exuberant entertainment Bath Time, aimed at two to five-year-olds.

“Our set is a bathroom,” Hulse told me, “which will look very familiar — slightly old fashioned but charming. Then two men, dressed as plumbers, come in wanting to play in the bathroom and, in a very childish way, they start trying to fix the taps and pipes. But they have no knowledge and are completely incompetent!

“Everything ends up broken and it’s good, classic slapstick with water everywhere. It’s pretty much as if you let two small children into your own bathroom with some tools and said, ‘get on with it’.”

The second part of each 40-minute show has the two performers, John McGrellis and Christian Reed, playing silly games in the bath, making bubble factories (as you do) and searching for a missing rubber duck.

Hulse, who has the dream job of teaching improvisation, clowning and children’s theatre at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, clearly takes his work seriously, as he showed when I asked him how, as a deviser and director of such pieces, he establishes that essential bond of trust that has to be in place with such young audiences.

“The key moment is when the two characters first walk on stage. I went to see a Korean children’s theatre company and it is their tradition that the actors greet the audience as they come into the theatre; they introduce themselves and give their names and tell them what parts they’ll be playing in the show and ask the children for their names “So a relationship is already established before the action begins. It seems crucial to the success of the piece.”

Bath Time is deliberately daft but gentle: there are no sudden noises or surprises that might frighten.

“It helps that John and Christian, who are in their mid-twenties are rather like big children themselves. It’s the equivalent of seeing your uncle at Christmas putting a funny hat on and you look at him and wonder whether, at that moment, he’s a child or an adult!”

It also helped that Hulse himself has two children, aged eight and five, and tried out his ideas on them — apparently they ended up writing some of the jokes.

As a major influence on his work, Hulse pays tribute to David Wood, who effectively created children’s theatre in this country; and then there was an interesting revelation.

“Before I worked in the theatre, I was a nursery school teacher. A lot of the training and work in that job has informed the way that we work with the audience, the way the stories are structured and the important element of repetition that’s needed.”

As we talked, Toby Hulse often returned to the concept of “the gentle warmth of children’s theatre”, which prompted me to ask if he ever involved baddies.

The answer was surprising.

“We’re not frightened to go to certain areas. There’s a theme that runs through Bath Time about being frightened if you’re left on your own; we’ve picked up on that common concern and the show articulates it — ‘I thought you’d left me on my own’, ‘I thought you might leave me’, ‘I wouldn’t leave you on your own, I love you, I’m always going to be with you’.”

A third career beckons, one feels: nursery teacher, children’s dramatist and now psychologist.

lBath Time will be on at 11am and 3pm from Friday, December 10, to Thursday 16, with three shows a day at 10am, noon and 3pm on the last three days of the run. There will be no shows on Monday 13.