BANK OF SCOTLAND INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN'S THEATRE FESTIVAL 2004.

CLOUDLAND
Royal Lyceum Theatre To 1 June
Runs 50min No interval

Gentle, visually elegant story for the young.With an age range from 3+, Travelling Light's much-toured adaptation of John Burningham's book has the youngest audience reach of any show in this year's Festival. It also has the least suitable venue.

When I first caught the piece at Clwyd Theatr Cymru's Emlyn Williams Theatre in April, the smaller space and open stage worked beautifully. In the larger Royal Lyceum with its proscenium arch fronting the raised stage, there's a distance and formality alien to the production.

It shows from the marching-band opening, which takes the four performers round the stalls, then mounting on to the stage. This theatre's built to give a finished picture to audiences, rather than to help this show build its essential performer-watcher link. And full-size tip-up seats are hardly the best form of seating for the very young.

Still the quality shows. The opening family day out on the mountainside sees parents and son picnicking on the rungs of a stepladder; the son's fall is the first instance of a device that could seem arbitrary but is used so aptly as to become natural: the interchange of live actor and puppet in portraying a character. And the slow-motion handling of a coat through the air brings a fine sense of the fall.

The cloud-children who rescue the lad wrap him in a white box, sheathing his sleeping figure in cloud-filmy white gauze as he sleeps. It's a beautiful picture, given a comic edge as the puppets try to wake him from an evidently deep sleep.

Though the subsequent adventures take these young people through rain and storm as well as fine weather, the overall mood is fleecy cumulus rather than threatening cumulo-nimbus. Then, after just the right time, homesickness seeps quietly in, leading to the return to earth. All good things have to end.

This isn't 'theme theatre' for the young but, rightly, a piece where images and feelings resonate with young experience of life and childlike imaginative leaps. It would be very good if it were simply an acted performance. With the sympathetic use of live music from 'cello, accordion and percussion it's a magical show that's up there in the stratosphere of young people's theatre.

2004-06-03 16:54:10