It’s an astonishing fact: The Little Prince is the third most printed book in the world after the Bible and Gone with the Wind. Maybe it’s this ubiquity of publication that makes many feel they know it, when in fact acquaintance with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 novella often extends little beyond a couple of much-quoted truisms and those exquisite watercolours that grace the original Gallimard edition.

So its pleasing to have the chance to learn, in Anthony Clark’s charming, positive-hearted production that provides a soothing alternative to the screeching rigours of pantomime, what has put the tiny royal up there with the word of God and the American Civil War. The story is simple enough: the Pilot, forced to crash-land in the Sahara, comes across the titular boy, who tells of his year of wandering from his home planet, asteroid B 612.

His journey includes encounters with a range of self-obsessed grown-ups, whom the Little Prince, played with winsome, baffled innocence by Jade Williams, judges with wise, childish eyes. The difficulty with this adaptation, also by Clark, is that these meetings seem overly episodic, and leave us struggling to pin a reductive, redemptive moral on each. The fluidity of the Prince’s time with Simon Robson’s gently disbelieving Pilot is far better achieved.

Attractive music from Mark Vibrans helps everyone on their way, and assured on-stage grand piano playing from the accomplished Robson and Dane Preece. Jessica Curtis’s design is a constant delight; the auditorium is decked with twinkling fairy lights and Robson gets to clamber about on a huge section of plane, complete with propeller.

Nevertheless, after the indubitable pleasures of these two hours, the uninitiated will yet remain uncertain as to why the LP has made it into 180 languages. We can but fall back on his trademark maxim: “It is only with the heart that one can see. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Until 10 January (020 7722 9301, www.hampsteadtheatre.com).