ACCORDING to his creator, Darren Gooding, it will be the last time for a while audience-goers can catch the tall tales of conjurer, scientist and strutting dandy, Leopold Thorn.

The Clockwork Girl is the third instalment of Darren's Leopold Thorn shows, which sees the most beguiling and mercurial of all magicians continue his quest to get his insomniac daughter to sleep with fantastical stories that would make Baron Munchausen blush.

As with his previous Thorn shows, Darren premiered it at the Colchester Arts Centre last autumn and as well as some adult language not suitable for little ears, the writer and performer will be bringing a little bit of magic to proceedings.

In The Clockwork Girl, Leopold recalls a bereaved clockmaker, Jameson Holtz, who is stirred from his frozen grief by the arrival of a lady unlike any he has ever met.

Offering him a commission to create the most fabulous and terrible object to which he could ever turn his astounding engineering skills, things take a turn for the worse when the fantastical Circus of Alice d’Lumiere comes to town and the laws of nature are re-written.

Darren says: “You can expect the usual mix of storytelling, verbal contortions and magic tricks, although, this time, the tone is somewhat darker.

"After the fairytale romance of Princess and the Candlesticks and the boisterous adult comedy of Terror Beneath the Boards, I wanted Clockwork Girl to take the Leopold Thorn stories back into deeper and more melancholy waters.

"This will be the last of the Leopold Thorns for 18 months as I'm taking a break from the series for a year to try out something very different in 2017."

The Storybook of Leopold Thorn,

Headgate Theatre,

Chapel Street North, Colchester.

Thursday, June 30. 7.45pm.

£9, £7 concessions. 01206 366000

www.headgatetheatre.co.uk