BANK OF SCOTLAND CHILDREN'S INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL.

Spread over four venues the two Traverse Theatre spaces, the fringe Garage and, for large-scale works, the Royal Lyceum (all within a minute's walk of each other) this year's Festival brought together 12 companies from Scotland and abroad. Several also performed in theatres elsewhere in Edinburgh and Scotland.

Beside those reviewed below, the Festival included Stirling's MacRobert with THE HAPPY PRINCE and Catherine Wheels in THE STORY OF THE LITTLE GENTLEMAN (both reviewed separately on Reviewsgate), a return of the 2001 Italian dance-theatre success A CHILDHOOD TALE, plus Switzerland's Theater Sgaramusch with a 35 minute English-language SNOW WHITE for 10+ and Denmark's Teatret Mollen with the highly-praised LENNIE AND GEORGE, a 75 minute version for 12+ of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.THE FLYING BABIES
Theatre Drak (Czech Republic) for 3+.
Royal Lyceum Theatre
Runs 50min No interval

A large-scale piece of comic movement-theatre in which three babies clamber from their pram and lose a balloon. Seeking to recover it they create a flying machine from the pram (some fine shadow-propulsion here) and chase the balloon. The sense of loss and being able to work co-operatively to build something, and gain a sense of achievement, come through the comedy as does the inevitability that things don't always fall into place first time, but it's worth going on. And young audiences love the giant balloon flying over their heads, to be tossed back and forth.

Giant props, from pram to balloon, augment the fun, though a formal theatre like the Lyceum may be a bit daunting for very young audience members.

Cast:
Radomil Vavra, Petra Cickakova, Milan Zdarsky

Director: Jakub Krofta
Lighting: Milan Steklik

A WORD IS A WORD
Teatret Fairplay (Denmark) for 3-6
Traverse 2
Runs 40min No interval

A quiet two-hander in one of the Festival's two small spaces, about two bored people on a derelict site (wire-mesh fence backed by a wooden fence with loose planks through which a woman visits a sleeping man: one of those unintended holes children love to find in adult constructions their very unintentional nature evokes the idea of adventure).

A number of empty boxes provide them with a game, setting up shop to sell words. There's plenty of fun with Angry words, and Rude ones. 'Silence' has a quietening effect. Not only is time filled, but a friendship's formed.

After the fun of the first half, the play takes a risk in becoming quieter and more serious. In the end, the new level of involvement justifies this. Vocabulary made fun might be a subtitle for this affectionately, calmly acted piece.

Cast:
Henrik Steen Larsen, Lotte Faarup.

THE QUEEN OF COLOURS
Theater Waidspeicher Peppentheater Erfrut (Germany) for 4-8
Traverse 2
Runs 50min No interval

Literal Performance Art, with one performer accompanying action on piano, another manipulating the shadow puppet Queen and a third drawing and colouring scenery. This is projected on to a screen, across which the shadow Queen moves.

The Court-Painter doing all this follows instructions from the bossy royal. Like many children, she wants colour in her life then wants everything to excess until it makes her uncomfortable. Blue sea is drawn for her to swim in she gets chilly. A sun warms her, so she wants suns drawing all over the sky until she's scorching.

Her girl's voice comes from the male puppeteer in the high vocal register, easily sounding petulant and demanding; the Court Painter's calm voice and manner are a perfect contrast.

Learning to listen and gaining self-control eventually bring their rewards, even to a royal. A fine fantasy spun from performance and technology.

Cast:
Eva Noell, Paul Olbrich
Musician: Tobias Rank

CIRKUS INFERNO
Daredevil Opera Company (Canada) for 7+
Royal Lyceum Theatre
Runs 1hr No interval

Forget opera, and to a large extent circus. This is the world of silent film slapstick: the central male character's flat hat and deadpan expression recall Buster Keaton specifically.

There's mayhem in the audience before things are properly underway as a young man and his girl edge along the front circle then stalls, scattering popcorn and squirting liquid all around. The promised show they've come to see, 'Cirkus Inferno' is cancelled, so they clamber on to a stage surrounded by posters for various genre films and proceed to create their worlds with a variety of physical near-accidents and disasters.

As always, it's the skill with which danger is made to appear inevitable, and then avoided by ingenuity or emergency action which makes this so scarifyingly funny. Though real fear's held well at bay by the performers' sublimely confident expressions.

The show also celebrates the edgy confrontation between anarchy and order in life. Moments before popcorn and liquid are spraying wildly around, the audience has been given a No Eating or Drinking rule. A No Laughing rule wouldn't survive half-a-minute with this circus on skates.

Cast:
Paul Weir, Jonah Logan, Amy Gordon

ALICE
Benchtours and Theatre sans Frontieres for 8+
Traverse 1
Runs 1hr 20min No interval

A huge bed is the centrepiece for this Lewis Carroll-derived piece. It becomes a chequerboard space in Wonderland, its multiple trapdoors opening for puppets and people to indulge in comments or chases.

Alice is a clarinettist, hectored by a gowned schoolteacher that there's a correct way to play. Bit inhibiting (though anyone who's overheard young people's instrumental practising will know there are certainly plenty of wrong ways to play). It seems a contrast's intended between this strict real world and the freeflowing Wonderland. But the latter, of course, is disturbing; frightening even.

The story's tempted many adapters: the problem is that Lewis Carroll's words are based in the mind of his real identity, Charles Dodgson, mathematician. The situations (and they are situations, rather than a story) follow a mathematical logic not something easily dramatised. The best version I remember was an open-air promenade production, which fragmented naturally as audiences moved around, and where natural locations could be used to enhance the action.

There's a nicely-acted Alice and some inventive staging, but a dull worthiness in establishing the contextual frame.

Cast:
John Cobb, Rocio Galan, Catherine Gilliard, Sarah Kemp, Claire Lamont, Alasdair Satchel

Co-director: Pete Clerke

STARS BENEATH THE SEA
Vanishing Point (Scotland) for 8+
Traverse 1
Runs 1hr 10min No interval

It seems every festival has to have one, and it might as well be from the home turf. It's hard to know what this piece is doing in a young people's Festival, or what many of the 8+ intended age range can be expected to make of it.

There's some good underwater visuals but not for long. The story meanders: a wreck, treasure, a funeral parlour, the ingredients somehow don't mix or add up to a coherent, let alone involving, story.

Hans Haldane: Sandy Grierson
George Philipousis/Franco: Sean Hay
Greta/Mr Onassis/Maria: Skye Loneragan
Paola: Itaxso Moreno

Directors/Designers: Kai Fischer/Matthew Lenton
Lighting: Kai Fischer
Music: John Anderson
Puppets: Shane Conlon

HAMLET
Det Lille Turneteater (The Little Touring Theatre Company) for 13+
Garage
Runs 1hr 35min No interval

And every Festival needs its much-talked of star show. Here it is. The kind of thing British Theatre in Education companies (if they still existed in large numbers) could use as a model.

True, there's little of Shakespeare's script in here(non-English-speaking audiences no more hear 'real' Shakespeare than British audiences do 'real' Ibsen or Chekhov). And a fair amount of the plot goes, or is compacted.

Yet there's a directness of speech and presentation that makes the core story of Hamlet vivid and exciting. With minimal costume, white lighting and a bench plus a skull for set, there's nothing to impede swift storytelling.

Then there are the two double basses. Wielded by a couple of cast members the instruments create high-pitched sighing, or scramble about in sinister activity down their lower registers. They're also used for brilliant onomatopoeia: screaming gulls or the canter of horses' hooves (as Hamlet and Horatio ride upon the prince's return from England and find Ophelia's funeral in progress).

The contrast between the relaxed narration of Horatio, and Hamlet's supercharged mission fuels the action, and the extensive doubling always seems clear.

Cast:
Peter Holst, Morten Nielsen, Jesper Egelund Pedersen, Christian Glahn

2003-06-05 16:38:40