Tilda Swinton may have only just have departed British terrestrial screens – Doctor Who hard on her heels – but the White Witch will be restored to her icy throne in a new stage adaptation of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by award-winning director Rupert Goold.

The Olivier award-winner has promised to deliver a "rougher, more elemental telling" of CS Lewis's classic children's novel, using a combination of hi-tech multimedia and puppetry. Not only is Goold considering dropping the original 1940s setting, he has told the Times (paywall) of plans to make the story less "posh," "less period" and "less Enid Blyton-like".

Collaborating with Michael Fentiman, soon to direct Titus Andronicus for Headlong and the RSC, Goold's production will open in Kensington Gardens in May. It will employ surround-screen multimedia techniques similar to those used in the 2009 staging of Peter Pan, which played to combined audiences of more than 150,000 in the same location before transferring to the 02 and touring the US.

Production company threesixty will resurrect their specially designed theatre tent, which enables Imax-style video backdrops, for the production.

The first of Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia series follows four siblings, Lucy, Peter, Susan and Edmund, through a wardrobe and into a fantastical realm ruled by the White Witch. A major film franchise launched in 2005, which starred Tilda Swinton and Ben Barnes, followed the much-loved BBC television serial that was rescreened this Christmas.

Goold said: "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe left a huge impression on me as a child. It's combination of fairytale strangeness and mythic spirituality seemed fundamentally English in sensibility, and returning to it now as an adapter and in reading all the stories to my children I also find it strangely Shakespearean too."

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