DIRECTOR John Sheedy is the brains behind the upcoming production of “Storm Boy”.

“Pelicans are very naughty,” he says, as we talk about the 1964 children’s novel by Colin Thiele, which was adapted into a 1976 film and seen by just about every Australian school child of the day, including Sheedy. We’ll see his version, adapted for the stage by playwright Tom Holloway, in early June at The Playhouse.

We agree that the movie’s a tearjerker – “beautiful and melancholy”, as Sheedy puts it. Set in the remote Coorong National Park of SA, it tells of an isolated child Mike, the “storm boy” of the title, who lives with his reclusive father, Hideaway Tom.

Through nurturing three orphaned pelican chicks and bonding closely with one, Mr Percival, and with the guidance of an exiled Aboriginal man, Fingerbone Bill, he learns about the land and its creatures and grows up.

Sheedy tells “CityNews” how he had long nurtured a “lingering wish” to do a stage version of Thiele’s work.

“I just loved that book and we watched the film at school… it had a sense of isolation and showed men dealing with grief. As well, the friendship of the boy and the pelican was unique… I got why it is an Australian classic; we all know these people”.

Besides, the Southern Ocean is where Sheedy grew up, in beachside Torquay, Victoria.

And there’s Mr Percival the pelican, “one of Australia’s most famous characters,” Sheedy says,.

“He’s the only pelican who comes back after he’s released… I loved that about him.”

Holloway, he emphasises, adapted the stage version from the novel, not from the film. There are no dune buggies hooning around, and he really honours Colin Thiele.

Luckily, Andrew Upton and Cate Blanchett were instantly attracted to the whole idea and became co-producers with the Perth-based Barking Gecko.

“I had Tom Holloway in mind to write the script right at the outset and his favourite animal is the pelican – can you believe that?” Sheedy says, praising a playwright of whose work he has long been a fan. “There’s a lovely, bruised quality to Tom’s writing… he understands undercurrents and he can be very economical with text, he knows when to replace words with action.”

And what action, especially when you’ve got pelican puppets such as Mr Proud, Mr Ponder and Mr Percival designed by Michael Scott Mitchell and two graceful new dancers-puppeteers, Anthony Mayor and Phil Dean Walford, both graduates of NAISDA Dance College. Under the guidance of former Canberra director Peter Wilson, the puppeteers are fully visible. With no black Lycra tights to hide them away, they achieve “a kind of a dreamtime story quality”, Sheedy believes.

“These life-size pelican puppets do all things pelicans do; they waddle, they peck, they flap and they fly. They’re very naughty pelicans.”

“Storm Boy”, The Playhouse, June 3-6, bookings to canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700.