"I'm a great believer in a good story," says Tim Britton. "But the slavish reliance on absolute narrative clarity is becoming, I think, a little bit obsessive nowadays.

I mean, it's not as if The Fall Of The House Of Usher had much of a plot."

Take a film archivist named Bernard Von Earlobe, a paranoid cinema manager named Edmund Lillyhair, three Macbeth-inspired sisters who trap people they don't like in celluloid loops and a bank manager who is consequently condemned to enact, for eternity, the same slapstick routine.

Gather these crazed caricatures together in battle over the ownership of a mysterious substance known as Liquid Film and you have a show which, while hardly Edgar Allen Poe, should delight even the most commitedly po-faced.

First staged in 1995 and now back by popular demand, The Fall Of The House Of Usherettes is the work of Forkbeard Fantasy, masters of comic cine-theatre whose theatrical method is a sort of orchestrated madness. Established in the Seventies by the brothers Tim and Chris Britton (later joined by third artistic director Penny Saunders), the company pioneered the use, now allprevailing, of live film on stage.

"In fact it was the magicians and theatrical people who first saw the possibilities of film," explains Britton, who will be playing Bernard Von Earlobe. "People such as George Melies, who ran a little magic theatre in Paris - he went to see the Lumieres brothers' first film show and thought, I could work with this live'. One of his most famous tricks was the inflating head and we use that in this show.

"We've always been fascinated by the mystery of filmcthe idea of the haunted screen and the way actors are almost trapped in frames until a projector gives them the semblence of life."

Mixing the magic of early film fantasy with surreal comic strip antics and an ingenious mechanical set, Britton reckons the main connection between The Fall Of The House Of Usherettes and Poe's gothic classic is "that slight smell of opium in the air, the whiff of drug-induced imaginings".

But don't be fooled by their gloriously hazy grip on reality. Forkbeard Fantasy are great believers in "doing everything ourselves" - just because you wrote the script there's no reason why you shouldn't perform it, just because you made the films, the animations and the soundtracks there's no reason why you shouldn't be the one to press play.

And behind the onstage anarchy is a gift for technical precision and a knowledge of their craft which has, in the past, even fooled the Press.

"We came up with this thing called Liquid Film," says Britton. "The idea was that it was banned because of its habit of slipping off the screen - actors and actresses kept disappearing and then reappearing in the wrong film.

"It also had this slightly bizarre effect on the audiences who were breathing in its vapours. It made their minds go a bit doolally.

"It's pure invention, of course," he says, "but when we first did this ten years ago we would be talking to journalists and they'd be going, Yah, yah, liquid film, of course, of course'. One photographer even claimed to know more about it than we did."

Starts at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £12.50 and £10, call 01273 709709.