BANK OF SCOTLAND CHILDREN'S THEATRE FESTIVAL 2006.
BANK OF SCOTLAND CHILDREN’S THEATRE FESTIVAL 2006
Various venues round Edinburgh and elsewhere provide an outstanding programme.
“… it’s true – the 2006 Bank of Scotland Children’s International Theatre Festival just gets better and better,” says its director Tony Reekie. “Better and better”? But whatever this precisely means, it’s a pretty wonderful event, a joyous occasion that involves schools, families and critics (the Scottish press gives children’s theatre here its due prominence). There are audience members and there are delegates, people involved with theatre for young people who visit this rich showcase, network with each other and learn from the work brought from overseas.
That work is impressive, though there’s a strong home ingredient too. Of 13 productions this year, 4 come from Scottish companies, another from England. For the rest, France, Germany, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands all provide shows. Denmark has 3, which comes as no surprise considering the high quality, adventurous work that country’s provided in recent years. Among the 8 shows I caught was Denmark’s Teater Refleksion/De Rode Heste in a small-scale show for 509s, dealing with death.
All Things Must End
Goodbye Mr Muffin has the style of a puppet show, a table-sized stage opening up to show Muffin’s garden, with a family outing scared back by birds, and house where this guinea-pig sits, an older, lone creature whose strength is going. Given that many young people’s first direct experience of death will be a pet or other animal, this character, as domestically loveable as any of the Wind in the Willows leads, is an apt choice. His slow decline in energy introduces the subject of life’s ending almost lyrically, resonating with a child’s sense of loss and early perceptions of mortality.
Mr Muffin played in the smaller of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre spaces, somewhere well suited to such intimate pieces. The Traverse is the Festival’s epicentre, though it spread to other city venues. Nor is this just another Edinburgh Festival. Many shows travel the M8 to Glasgow, or visit the Borders, Stirling or Highlands and Islands.
Love And Understanding
What emerges is a magnificent range of theatre styles and techniques applied to work for young people. If death is tricky, what about sex? Netherlands company Theatergroep Max call their show Love but mating rituals and unpredictable affections are its theme. Aimed at 8-12s its younger audiences might well be laughing at the ridiculous behaviour on display, while older members could react with the laughter (or embarrassment) of recognition.
The frank (yet unoffensive) material includes a lot of references to dumping friends and wanting, or not, to go out with various hims and hers. Highly physical, quick-moving and with no continuous narrative it has something of the sketch show yet hangs together well. And the pastoral backing, with a neutral backing where characters generally reminiscent of a harlequinade bounce round, gives a neat distance that makes the wayward behaviours recognisable and typical rather than specific and individual.
The Fairy-Tale Man
In 2006 a Hans Andersen link might be expected. Denmark fittingly provides it in Gruppe 38’s small-scale The Little Match Girl Told obliquely, its apparent one-woman story aided by alleged lighting and sound men, the piece has a quiet charm if requiring considerable concentration.
That’s for 7-12s, a tad more than Germany’s Andersen offering, The Brave Tin Soldier, from Puppentheater Am Meininger Theater. Designed for 6-11s and played in the Music Hall at the Assembly Rooms (on a huge floor-space covered with seating during Edinburgh Fringe Festival shows), it seemed initially a cold prospect, as a small audience sat facing a huge cloth covered space, with just one performer tramping around.
Soon the cloth billowed up, suggesting a mix of bedclothing and dreamclouds, forming an inflatable chamber which the audience entered, dreamlike, for a mesmerizing display of whirling shadows, small, visible figures thrown vast on to the tent’s curving walls while a vision of loveliness pirouettes with silent mystery through the physical space. This ballerina’s an apt theatrical picture of an idealised figure, balancing ethereally as the wounded one-legged soldier must in his more earthbound way.
From The Street
Different dance from Scotland’s Freshmess, sandwiching a reflective central slice between 2 high-energy dashes, contemporary dance inflected with the dialect of youth patterns for 8-16s. This is a programme to bridge childhood and the teen years when receptivity to theatre falls away. It can still be seen at The Lemon Tree Aberdeen, 23 June and the Brunton, Musselburgh 29 June, then in August at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. And, for the same range, came TV and Buddhism-inspired Monkey, the largest-scale show, from Dundee to the Royal Lyceum.
This piece shows the distinct advantage of having a repertory theatre linked to a dance company, as Dundee Rep is with Scottish Dance Theatre. Cheeky Monkey with his mantra “Time to play” embodies a freewheeling, creative yet irresponsible approach to life, inventive without wisdom. While the philosophic, religious sentences help shape the play’s long journey, there’s no doubt where the piece’s spirit really lies as ropes swing, sticks clash and bodies leap. From the opening cartwheels it’s an exhilarating ride.
Not Just For Children
At times the word ‘Children’s’ seems the odd one out in the Festival. This isn’t only a Children’s Festival; it has theatre for youth and for babies. Theatre for the very young is especially tricky. When it works there’s something like Schnawwl Kinder Und Jugendtheater Am National Theater Mannheim’s one-man A Cloud’s Journey.
This, for 3-7s, is a journey through earthly terrains a cloud might pass in a particularly varied day. Desert, jungle, sea etc. are ingeniously created through a set of cubes, while the performance (like almost all the foreign companies, in fluent if accented English) gently encourages audience responses, moving among the youngsters at Muirhouse’s North Edinburgh Arts Centre. A slight argument over the king of the jungle (lion said the audience, tiger claimed the cast) could not upset the delightful, involving relationship created.
My sole disappointment was the French contribution, for the youngest audience of all. Compagnie Lili Desastres’s Scribble, aimed at 1-3’s, wasn’t ideally suited to the formal seating and raked auditorium of Peebles’ Eastgate Theatre. A mother and child were politely (and correctly, in view of fire regs.) asked to move from the aisle before the show. Before the end half the audience was seated in, or wandering around, the aisle.
It is too slow and indeterminate to grab attention, its black-and-white, pointed-hat character unfortunately looking to British eyes like a member of the sorority of wicked witches. Little happened, the character lacked a genuine relationship with the youngsters and no emotional coherence held attention. Unlike the forceful dramas elsewhere in this Festival, this was a mere dramatic doodle.
But one disappointment hardly clouds a Festival which brings together such a variety of theatrical styles, showing that the old Theatre-in-Education focus on ‘issues’ can combine with storytelling and colourful production. There’s been love, death and dreams in a kaleidoscope of whirling invention.
2006-06-21 11:14:31