It was the first day of rehearsals inside the venerable Mirror Tent, moored on BMW’s giant Cowley car park. Once again the tent is being used for Creation Theatre’s Christmas show, which this year is a new production of Beauty and the Beast.

“It’s quite weird,” actor Susie Riddell told me. “If you stand in the middle of the stage, the roof of the tent projects the sound straight back down at you. So you think you’re speaking really loudly, but in fact the audience would hardly be able to hear you at all.”

Meanwhile work was going ahead adjusting a trapdoor in the stage floor.

“It’s amazing what a difference moving a handle an inch can make,” writer and movement director Dan Bye explained.

Dan’s wife, Sarah Punshon, is directing the show.

They met eight years ago at a National Student Drama festival. Have they lived, eaten, and slept theatre ever since?

“Occasionally we go to the cinema as well,” Sarah laughed.

“I’m really enjoying working with Dan. We were a little bit nervous about it: we have worked on youth theatre projects before, but this is the first time we’ve done a big, professional show together.

“I remember the first time I said: ‘Right, we’re going to have a script meeting’. Dan had written the first draft of Beauty and the Beast, and there were changes I wanted to make.

“That’s always a process of negotiation with any writer, because they’re not going to like all of your notes. So I was quite nervous about criticising my husband’s work.

“There were probably several meetings, over a number of weeks,” Dan added with a chuckle.

“There was one two-and-a-half-hour train journey when we talked about it the whole way: ‘Should this word be there or there? Oh, shut up, have your sandwich’.

“The other passengers must have been heartily sick of us. If I don’t agree with something, I tend to go: ‘I’ll think about that’, and then just not do it. Or I’ll think: ‘Yes, she was right about that’, and just quietly accede to her note.”

There was much cheerful bantering between Sarah and Dan as they talked, and as the rehearsal proceeded, it was easy to see that the couple’s enthusiasm was transmitting itself to the cast.

From the sample scene I saw, the production is more red-blooded than the familiar Disney film and touring stage show, with the Beast (John Dorney) roaring across the stage like an express train.

“It’s not sanitised, and made cosy,” Sarah confirmed. “It’s about this girl who has to go and do frightening things, and face a frightening beast.

“She has to make difficult choices, and grow up. She also has to make herself open to romantic love, and that’s a really scary thing. It’s a kind of ‘rites of passage’ story.”

“I’ve never seen the Disney version, I don’t know how I’ve managed to avoid it,” Dan admitted.

“I’ve seen lots of other stage versions though. It becomes muddy — what’s the original story and what’s a stage version? Sometimes I’ll be convinced that I’ve invented something, then someone says: ‘But that’s a classic part of such and such a version’.

“It also happens the other way round — that I’m convinced something is part of the original story, but it turns out that I’ve made it up.

“For example, in every version of Beauty and the Beast I’ve ever seen, the father is a rich merchant who has lost all his money on a ship. But I don’t find that very sympathetic, it doesn’t bring me into the story. So I’ve made Dad a shipwright rather than a merchant. His son Tom is first mate on the ship, and the ship sinks.

“As a result, Dad simply can’t bear to be near the sea any more, he feels this awful sense of shame and responsibility for the sinking. That’s why the family have had to move.”

It was still early days when we met, but there was already one scene in the show that was plainly giving director Sarah Punshon considerable pleasure.

“When we first enter the Beast’s castle, all his servants are invisible — they’re visible to the audience, but not to the other characters on stage.

“When they speak, all you’ll hear will be a glockenspiel sounding like somebody talking. There’s something really magical about that.”

Beauty and the Beast runs at the Mirror Tent at the BMW plant, Oxford, from tomorrow until January 16. Box office: 01865 766266 or at the website www.creationtheatre.co.uk