IF ALL THE WORLD WERE PAPER. To 18 February.
London
IF ALL THE WORLD WERE PAPER
by Tim Webb
Lyric Studio Hammersmith To 18 February 2006
7-10 Feb 10.30am & 1pm, 11; 13-18 Feb 11am & 2pm
Runs 1hr No interval
TICKETS: 08700 500511
www.lyric.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 February at Royal Exchange Studio Manchester
If only all children’s theatre were this skilfully done.
This show should delight its 2-5 year old audiences, and give pleasure to adults accompanying them too. Only the awkward age in-between will find it silly. Such different reactions are inevitable, for the very young react differently from those a few years older.
What matters here is not so much story as images. Put another way, the narrative arises through make-believe pleasure in what’s seen, rather than through a sequence of events. If the main adventure happens to someone called Paper Girl, who loses her 3 sisters, what does it matter if we’ve seen all 4 being cut out of a sheet of paper, before one of the girls is torn away from the others?
After all, it’s make-believe, as is the comforting notion tried out at the start, that saying something into a paper-bag means you keep that thing safe inside (paper bags are provided as programmes, complete with paper-plates and a crayon for later audience involvement). The character names won’t have ‘mean’ anything to the young, but somehow suit these strange and happy people. And the staging blossoms from the initial black-and-white masqueraders’ costumes, through the blue dress Paper Girl acquires when her over-confidence at looping in her paper-aeroplane leads her to crash into a sea of ink, to the highly-coloured garden of a, really rather friendly, monster.
Paper runs throughout, from the early drawing of a house’s outline on a huge paper screen (audience members enjoying recognise it take shape), and a character bursting through its giant door. Reflecting Oily Cart director Tim Webb’s understanding of his audiences, the physical facts of the staging, the representation of things by paper or person and the exploration of visual images fuse to fascinate young minds.
Asking the audience to frighten Paper Girl may not be the most sensitive piece of interaction, and the formal seating (in Manchester, at least), even with mats at the front, lacks the intimacy of some Oily Cart shows. But this company remains at the forefront of theatre for the very young, providing an object lesson in how to involve its audiences on physical, mental and emotional levels.
Squiggle/Paper Girl: Keiko Hewitt-Teale
Curlicue: Karina Garnett
Doodle: Mark Stevenson
Director: Tim Webb
Designer: Claire de Loon
Lighting: Stuart Willcocks
Movement: Keiko Hewitt-Teale
Bird Puppets: Sue Dacre
2006-02-09 01:08:05