Jurassic Jolly Roger

With children as your audience, it's pretty hard to go wrong with pirates, dinosaurs or any combination thereof. Bearing that in mind, Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs was probably a smart choice for the much-acclaimed and multidisciplinary Les Enfants Terribles theatre company as their first foray into children's theatre.

Following the success of phantasmagorical First World War drama The Trench last summer, the Fringe veterans' latest venture, adapted from the book by Giles Andreae and Russell Ayto, heads for this year's Fringe under the auspices of their newly established children's company Les Petits. As its first production, standards remain high: no matter how much of a safe bet the juxtaposition of giant reptiles and buccaneers may seem, there are few critics more icily unforgiving than a theatre full of kids.

Director, producer and co-founding Enfant James Seager admits that, despite being immersed in theatre for over a decade, it was only recently that he became well-aquainted with the children's side of it: "Probably because I now have a four-year-old daughter," he says, chuckling. "And as a result, I have been going to see a lot of children's plays in her company. Some of it is very good," he allows diplomatically, "but unfortunately, a lot of it isn't. Being both a parent and a punter, the laziness in a lot of children's theatre suprised me. There was a lot of talking down to the audience, as if they deserved less."

Displaying the ambition which has become their trademark, Les Enfants felt that not only could they do better than the bulk of what was on offer, but they could do so without sacrificing the company's distinct, otherworldly aesthetic: "Ollie [writer and co-founder Oliver Lansley] and I wanted to do what we usually do with Les Enfants, only with a kids' show. Les Petits was set up specifically to do children's theatre, using the techniques and styles we've developed with Les Enfants."

Returning Fringe audiences should be familiar with the polymathic diversity of Les Enfants' repertoire: The Trench was an astonishing blend of live music, surreal, intricate puppetry and hellish, vividly-realised symbolist staging, which combined into a truly unique and haunting experience. Despite Captain Flinn's marked shift in tone (which, Seager laughs, has been a little jarring for those who have worked on both shows) Les Petits employs just as much multimedia mastery in creating the appropriate atmosphere and bringing the story to life.

"We usually do puppetry and llive music, it's part of what we're known for," Seager says, "but those techniques all help carry the audience into the adventure of the story. And it should be a real adventure: a little boy discovers a pirate crying in the corner of his classroom and decides to help him win back his ship, which has been stolen by the eponymous pirate dinosaurs." While not going into detail regarding how the dinosaurs have been realised for the stage, Seager promises their beasts of a bygone age will be "big and scary, but also fun. In particular, the T-Rex—the main baddie of the piece—is something pretty special."

Considering the eternal fascination which seems to exist between the show's intended audience and its subject matter, Seager observes that "children always find dinosaurs a rather fascinating concept. One of my daughter's little friends, a boy who's about three or four, is utterly amazing – he can recite whole lists of dinosaurs which I can barely pronounce." Many children are like this at one stage or another, we decide; unfortunately, times-tables and other such useless information eventually forces all those wonderful dino-facts from our youthful minds.

When I ask what the experience of moving from adult-oriented to children's theatre has been like, Seager shrugs that for Les Petits, the shift has been fairly untraumatic: "We want to do what appeals to us, so we're less conscious of divisions like age. For example, we're doing a show at the moment called Imaginary Menagerie, which is a big family piece, quite close in spirit to children's theatre. While we were putting it together, we were thinking less about whether the show was for adults or children, and more about what suited the script. Everything follows the story."

"What we care about most," he concludes emphatically, "is not treating the audience like they're stupid. Kids can be much more intelligent and resilient than you might expect. Roald Dahl, whose work is famously dark and gruesome and has been a big influence on us, is a perfect example - kids can take a lot. We want to do a show that both kids and parents will enjoy, and will patronise neither of those groups. There is no need to dumb down."

A worthwhile sentiment for theatre in general, and a good omen for Captain Flinn.