This post originally featured in Lane’s List in January 2015.
I was fortunate enough at the start of 2015 to be part of Travelling Light Theatre’s Feast event, which is an annual round-trip of five Christmas shows across three theatres in Bath and Bristol: two at the Bristol Old Vic, two at the Tobacco Factory Theatres and one at the egg.
I skipped Swallows and Amazons at the Old Vic having seen it on its first outing four or five years ago, but was assured by others that it’s kept its playful swashbuckling spirit and theatrical imagination.
This year I was also able to take an age-range-specific audience member with me to two of the shows (along with my wife) and so actually be a family at a family show. For real.
This is an advance from being the apparently single odd bloke in the back row of a show for kids, curiously scribbling notes down amidst furtive glances from parents.
I’m not really interested in writing four reviews for you – you can go to the newspapers and online sites for that – so I thought I’d just share my experiences as I remember them.
My two year-old daughter Maya had to leave The Magic Elves twice at the Bristol Old Vic studio, mainly because she couldn’t walk across the stage (twice) and play with the toy push-button till in the shoemaker’s shop.
Admittedly there was a lot of very exciting stuff to play with as a two year-old, but they don’t really get that fourth wall thing yet. The world is not about fourth walls. It’s about everything being available NOW especially colourful bright things that look fun – which a lot of children’s theatre often offers. So how that’s then handled by the show is important, I think, so that you make it clear what’s on offer.
Something didn’t work for me with this show. It felt like there was a lot happening on stage that was fun for the performers, but not quite enough of it shared with the audience. It felt deliberately showy and a bit glitzy, and deliberately loud and anarchic in a slightly self-conscious and untruthful way. Plus the story was – well, boring.
You didn’t care about any of the characters and everything was very thinly drawn: it felt a little like the story came last and was simply a helpful vehicle for lots of things you think you put in children’s theatre shows (spangly costumes, physical theatre, men in women’s dresses and playing the Queen, over-sized props).
There was also a lot of dialogue (which a colleague and friend of mine who runs a children’s theatre described as simply ‘white noise’ to anybody under the age of three or four) and simply not enough wonder. There was little to stimulate our imaginations as everything was pretty much there in front of us – and too often, into the space by the cast and not outwards, to be shared with us.
Santa’s Little Trolls at The Brewery (Tobacco Factory Theatres) was the opposite. Every little thing that happened, happened with us and for us and was shared with us. The story was simple and clear, the use of puppets and design was imaginative, and the performers knew how to bring in a whole audience of children with a single gesture. The structure was tight but not rushed, full but not overly-complicated.
Most importantly, our imaginations and all of our senses were invited in to the show: a Casio rendition of the Ski Sunday music plays as a fifteen year-old girl holds two mops under her arms and a colander on her head to do the downhill slalom; a washing basket of balled-up cotton socks become snowballs which we’re all encouraged to fling back at a character; a huge book is opened up and silhouettes move within it to tell an ancient story; the physicality and rhythm of the humans and puppets help tell the story as much as the words do; the characters have pathos, objectives, stakes and desires.
Maya was transfixed for an hour. She made it into ten minutes at the Old Vic.
Which leaves only Travelling Light’s own 101 Dalmatians at the Tobacco Factory Theatres. From the moment its cast arrived on stage – again, same principle as above – they knew that they had to be with us.
They taught us the rules of the doubling (actors play the doggy counterparts of their human owners, often with sublime fluidity between roles), of the show, its language (use of space, costume, sound, music and physicality was crucial to following the narrative) and how it was going to speak it with the help of our imaginations. Its sense of playfulness and ability not to take itself too seriously was infectious.
In addition it opens with a man, introduced through music and silent interaction as fairly benign, suddenly suffocating a rabbit in a suitcase. No, really. The slumped I’m-too-cool-for-school-now-I’m-eleven audience members suddenly had both hands over their mouths. OMG.
That is theatre taking a risk with its audience. It bloody worked too – because from that moment, you knew this piece had the ability to both caress you and bite you at the same time: and who doesn’t want to feel that sense of potential in a live theatre?
In my 24-hour Christmas theatre adventure I remembered that you’ve got to give the imagination space to do its thing.
Let us wonder. Let us work. Let children partake with that over-sized muscle they have yet to see shrivelled through years of adult cynicism – their creativity. Let them take ownership.
In fact, let all audiences do that, whether you’re working that muscle through theme, structure, language, character, form, physicality, space… whatever it is. Don’t try and impress us. Just be truthful.
And to the woman behind me in Row B who audio-narrated to her children the ENTIRE stage action and narrative of Santa’s Little Trolls FOR AN HOUR at The Brewery, I say this: please, please, please let your children take ownership of their experience in a theatre next time.
The comprehension children have of the world goes far beyond the literal, and in one of the most amazing shared live creative environments we can gift to a child, you literalised the entire thing for them before they had a chance to decide for themselves.
Let them decide. Or let them get lost in wondering. It’s what you’ve forgotten to do.
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