Creatures wear patterned knitwear and snazzy leggings: there's a fox with a handlebar moustache and a tortoise in a cagoule. Fly Davis's design is a retro delight: a forest salvaged from Oxfam, all orange-brown wallpaper and spidery pot plants.

It's all the more shocking because Wils Wilson's production is so utterly, lovably cuddly up until then. It is as gobsmacking a thing as you'll see on a stage. And we hear the sharp snap of his neck when the bear takes it back. We see him tap-dancing through the forest, gleeful and behatted.

Here, we see Steven Webb's upbeat Duracell bunny pinch said hat from the snoozing bear. What of the rabbit in the red hat he passed en route? 'I would not eat a rabbit,' the bears says, a little too quickly. He plods past the rank and file of the forest asking each in turn if they've seen his hat and, eventually, we see bear and hat reunited. Klassen's deadpan drawings show us the bear's search and rescue mission. What Jon Klassen's illustrated kids' book leaves unsaid, the National Theatre's stage adaptation makes explicit. Or, indeed, the red woollen entrails hanging loosely from the bear's lower jaw.

Or the rabbit's face, frozen in pain but for his chattering teeth. What she neglected to mention, however, was the now hatless bunny rabbit on the floor beside him, twitching like a stuck second hand. Marek Larwood's slow-witted bear had indeed got his hat back. 'HE GOT HIS HAT BACK,' yelled a little girl, four at the most, in the front row.

I want my hat back review