Few children's plays negotiate the tricky balance of being simple without being simplistic. I Theatre's first play of the year, Little Violet and the Angel, does just this, achieving the stark simplicity of a fable without being in the least patronising.

The angel of the title is Gabriel, a low-ranking one (you can tell, apparently, by the size of their wings) who "just woke up one day surrounded by clouds and celestial beings". He is told by his boss, the archangel Gabriel (Juwanda Hassim, resplendant in huge, billowy wings) to become the guardian angel for a child named Violet, who has just been abandoned at the doorstep on an old couple, Vlad and Ana-Marie.

The small cast was very strong, with Kimberly Creasman particularly moving as Ana-Marie, a grief-stricken woman who has hardened her heart against love, while remaining painfully vulnerable. Also excellent was Keegan Kang as Gabriel who made the most of his matinee-idol looks - keeping children spellbound with his charm, and making their mothers blush with his flirty, dirty smile. Jonathan Lim was a kindly, bumbling presence as Violet's well-meaning father, and Joni Tham delightfully officious as an orphanage owner who sees her charges as so many dollar signs.

The real star of the show, though, was Little Violet, played by a series of remarkably life-like puppets from the Theatre Centre, London, manipulated by Tham and voiced by Chio Su-Ping. Violet appears first as a baby, then a toddler, and finally a little girl. Chio is astonishingly good at creating a different voice for each stage of her growing up, and making real a character who is after all only bits of cloth and wood.

British playwright Philip Osment has created an enthralling world in which angels watch over us and all of life is inter-connected in ways we cannot imagine. The play's Romanian setting adds to the haunting atmosphere, full of cold winds, man-eating bears, and a winter so oppressing that the coming of spring is an unimaginable relief. Sebastian Zeng's set swathes heaven in white sheets while making the world depressingly wooden and solid.

Brian Seward's sensitive direction keeps the production finely balanced, making it deeply moving without once slipping into sentimentality. Children are the best critics, and the children in the audience at the performance I attended were completely spellbound - but then so were the adults around them.

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Jeremy Samuel is a literature and performance graduate