In trying to persuade young children to take part in a school play, certain skills are required. Among those are instilling enthusiasm, encouraging confidence and being able to bring together a sense of teamwork and purpose.

Hardenhuish Lower School, who put on Arabian Nights, an adaptation by Dominic Cooke, triumphantly did all those things, in a wonderful night’s entertainment. Nearly 40 young students melded together to produce a complex mixture of dialogue and choreography that filled the hall with sound and motion.

A feast for the eyes as well as the ears, each story told by Sharazad, (from the original Scheherazade), was played beautifully by a cast that were clearly determined to make the night a success.

All the young actors played their parts well and some roles were surprisingly vibrant and adult.

As in a previous production, one student really stood out.

Charlie Sloper, playing the part of the Thieves’ Captain was compelling the moment he swept on to the floor. He reminded me of Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter.

Arabian Nights is actually a very gory tale of male chauvinism, but I can report that all beheadings, stabbings, dissections and slicings were carried out in the nicest possible way, with the paper mache swords doing little harm.

For me, I found the self-narration slightly confusing. To have each character telling their story is vaguely distracting and often led to difficulty in determining when the narration ended and the dialogue began. However, this is a production decision and in no way detracted from the children's performance.

The production values were impeccable with a simple but effective stage set, and superlative direction.

Holly Darling did a superb job with direction and props and Duncan Ellis proved once again why Hardenhuish School is lucky to have him. Together they forged 40 students together as a team to create a memorable production, one that the School can be proud of.