Reviews: Children’s Shows, Edinburgh Festival 2014
I’ve consolidated my reviews of this year’s Edinburgh Festival into themed categories. First, children’s shows.
Click the name of the review you’d like read, otherwise just scroll down!
Dr Longitude’s Marvellous Imaginary Menagerie
All reviews were written either for Fest Mag (www.festmag.co.uk) or The Independent (www.independent.co.uk), the place of publication is specified below each.
The Sagas of Noggin the Nog, 3 STARS
The Nogs are a charmingly mild-mannered bunch of Vikings. They sound a bit like Terry Jones, they look a bit like him too. Except for Noggin. Noggin the Nog, their young leader, is handsome in a Viking sort of way. From my seat in the audience I was almost picked to marry him. But Noggin decided on the Princess of the Nooks instead. They bonded over a love of cocoa and hot buttered toast.
Buttered toast is very important to the Nogs. There’s no threat so desperate, be it storm-lashed seas or marauding dragons, that they can’t stop to make toast round that sine qua non of Viking icoNOGraphy: a glowing camp fire.
The first ever stage production of Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate’s much loved television series retains the homespun, low-tech aesthetic of the original without looking in any way amateurish. While much of the low-key humour derives from the sort of knowledge of the series which belongs to the older members of the audience, there’s still plenty of fun for the younger ones. It’s a close call as to who enjoys it more, the children or their grandparents.
An expertly acted, beautifully realised stage play with the warm charm of a bedtime story.
Assembly George Square Gardens until 25 Aug
[The Independent]
Duck, Death and the Tulip, 4 STARS
A duck meets Death, they drink tea, swim in a pond, climb a tree. The seasons change. The duck dies. Death lays a tulip by her body. Duck, Death and the Tulip. That’s all: no more. It seems slight, almost still and, in spite of the dialogue, this play has a wordless dream-like quality.
The set is starkly minimalist: blackness presided over alternately by a marigold sun or a luminous lace moon. Death, the one human presence on stage, and the puppet Duck are brightly spot-lit, which renders them pearlescent. A scene of light and dark for a tale of life and death.
Such simplicity feels almost shocking. In a society which acts as if it believes that the young must be offered sensory stimulation at every moment of every day, only a brave children’s show dispenses with flashes, bangs, songs and bright colours. In foregoing these the Little Dog Barking Theatre stays true to the spareness of German author Wolf Erlbruch’s original story as well as showing an unusual respect for its young audience –who repay this in abundance with their spellbound silence.
Duck, Death and the Tulip has something of the mythic quality of Raymond Brigg’s The Snowman, and like it deals with eternal themes of love and death in a way that children can understand and accept. An unusual and tender piece of children’s theatre.
Summerhall until 24 Aug
[Fest]
Human Child, 4 Stars
A country of eternal playtime, where no one makes you go to school and sorrow is unknown, sounds wonderful, at least until you remember all you have left behind.
Based on W.B. Yeats early poem, The Stolen Child, this beguiling children’s play has many of the components of a children’s classic -from the lonely imaginative child at its heart to the heady tumble into strange worlds.
Misfit Leila doesn’t want to play the boring games of other children. Why should she have to be a secretary or damsel just because she’s a girl? Her dad is finding her hard to cope with and her teacher is always telling her off for being “awa’ wi’the faeries”. And then one day, when Leila is feeling especially hurt and misunderstood, idiom becomes reality. She answers the siren call of three sprites to “Come away, O human child!” and leave a mortal land “more full of weeping than you can understand.” But all is not as it seems, and soon the race is on for Leila to return home before a changeling takes her place forever.
Irish theatre collective, Collapsing Horse, was founded by a musician, an actor, a puppeteer and a comedian and Human Child reaps all the multi-disciplinary benefits. The live guitar music, including a beautiful folk setting of Yeats’ poem, is atmospheric; puppet work is imaginative and varied; acting is uniformly strong and, importantly, the script bubbles over with Irish craic.
Human Child’s unexpectedly poignant lesson mellows the production’s brassy top notes and lingers longer in the mind than a more conventional Happily Ever After.
Underbelly, Cowgate until 24th Aug
[Fest]
The Cat in the Hat, 3 STARS
For a book designed to help children to read, The Cat in the Hat has had a rich life ex-libris. First it was made into a film and then Katie Mitchell adapted it for the National Theatre’s stage. Were that other staple of 1950s literacy aids, Janet and John, ever to receive a theatrical incarnation, I should imagine they would conduct themselves much better than Dr Seuss’s fun-focussed feline. There’s not much good behaviour in this noisy revival of National Theatre production, but then what can you expect from a world where balls (real and imaginary) squeak, honk, and fart; hand-puppet fish gawp orgasmically; and bubbles rain down from the ceiling?
Ashley Bates is purringly camp in the title role, and, as Thing One and Thing 2, Richard Dipper and Andrew Beckett are anarchy personified, expertly strutting that oh-so-delightful line between frightening and funny. If at times they seem a mite pervy, it all adds to the fun.
In fact, the production is at its best when the anarchy on stage tips over into the auditorium. Fest won’t give away any of the play’s surprises but I did, briefly, end up desperately ducking for safety while children rioted in the aisles (parents, be very afraid).
This is a lively retelling of Dr Seuss’s classic, the physical theatre is deftly managed, and although the children took a while to warm up (I was with the children on this), by the end they had been entirely won over.
Pleasance Courtyard until 25th Aug
[Fest]
Dr Longitude’s Marvellous Imaginary Menagerie, 4 STARS
Think steampunk mixed with Adam Ant and you have an idea of the aesthetic of this diabolically delightful musical romp. It’s visually dizzying. Not because of high-tech effects but because of the attention to detail and sheer inventiveness with which the company uses the space. Imaginative use of simple props to create trompe l’œil—a synchronised swimming display performed behind a blue sheet, for instance—can be more entrancing than lots of fancy technology.
Dr Longitude is a collector of weird and wonderful animals. Of course, being Victorian this means most of the animals he collects, he shoots—dead elephants are cheaper to feed. But a few, like the bumble wasp—a huge buzzing insect with a passion for jam—he traps live in order to add it to his menagerie. In the course of capture 19 identically named natives are stung to death – but no matter, he traps the blighter who’s been disturbing his afternoon tea in the end.
It is one of those rare children’s plays which makes very few concessions to its audience. By this I don’t just mean that there’s some submerged naughty humour to keep the adults happy (there is, there’s plenty) but that it’s Dahlesque in its amorality.
A beautifully realised pacey production performed with great panache. It has all the dark allure of the circus and of baroque Victoriana but is too heartless to penetrate deeply, and too frightening for the very youngest children.
Pleasance Courtyard until 25th Aug
[Fest]
Miranda Kiek 