Student actors return to childhood — to toys and teddies and not a few tantrums — in an engaging new stage adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s children’s classic The Little Prince.

Oxford University Dramatic Society’s offering at the forthcoming Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the hour-long show, directed by Rafaella Marcus, is being presented on home ground this week (until Thursday) in the attractive setting of the Master’s Garden at University College.

The story of the space-travelling prince’s odyssey of self-discovery is familiar to most, either from the book itself — more than 80 million copies of which have been sold around the world — or from adaptations in various media, including Lerner and Loewe’s 1974 film musical.

This is perhaps as well, for the play’s writer, Theo Merz, adds to the potential for confusion over what is already a bizarre and slightly baffling tale by adding a new framing device. Its pilot narrator (Ziad Samaha) recounts the adventure to a group of 1940s children — with suggestions of Just William in their dress and behaviour — who go on to play the various characters in the drama.

This makes for lively, fast-moving entertainment as the youngsters rush and tumble within a wide acting space surrounded by the encircling audience and the properties — a dressing up box, a wind-up gramophone, a blackboard — distributed among them in Rachel Beaconsfield Press’s design.

Lucy Fyffe lends an appropriate other-worldliness to her portrait of the Prince and makes his death through the fangs of the Snake (Alex Jeffery) genuinely affecting.

I also greatly enjoyed Jordan Waller’s less than magisterial King, Jessica Norman’s much-loved Rose and Alex Jeffery, again, as the Geographer, comically focused on his subject to the exclusion of all else.