THE TALE OF TEEKA.
Young People
THE TALE OF TEEKA
by Michel Marc Bouchard translated by Linda Gaboriau
Pilot Theatre Company at York Theatre Royal To 30 November 2002
Runs 50min No interval
Review Timothy Ramsden 28 November
Challenging young audiences is one thing; socking them in the face with darkness is another.Typical, isn't it? You wait ages for a play about one person and a goose, then two come along. But the impact here's very different from Catherine Wheels' delicate Martha. This production swipes its audiences hard before giving them anything to latch on to.
There's a neat enough model goose and some good farmyard comedy midway through, as Teeka plays havoc with buckets and clothing, not to mention young Maurice's posterior.
But there's an awful lot of talk to get through in the beginning, and a promise – of a story adult Maurice wishes he'd been told when he was a child. As what follows seems to be about what happened when he was a child, I'm unsure of his point here. Nor does the story especially justify itself as deserving to jump the queue when it comes to ones young people've just got to hear.
Maurice and Teeka (like Martha and goose-pal) eventually make their way inside the house. They play a game of Tarzan, aided by jungle-pattern bedding. With the kind of accident that's real enough but death to any sense of tragic fatality, parents arrive back on the farm early and, it seems, to save his skin Maurice wrings Teeka's neck.
Perhaps it loses something in translation (which speaks well enough, chucking in occasionally unfamiliar words, but that's all part of education); maybe the production doesn't quite hit something in the focus. But it's a downright bleak ending, more than enough to give the lightest Disney habituee severe indigestion. You just don't do things like this: in child-meets-animal tales you don't end up like Romeo and Juliet. Especially not with Romeo giving Juliet (or vice versa) the coup de grace.
There again, there's been a destructive bleakness to child Maurice all along, with his obsession over a vengeful Tarzanic deity. I know adult critics always miss the point at these things, and good children's writers hit a different type of childhood perception, so I can only report the school group alongside me laughed at the funny bits but gave it overall a decidedly muted reception.
Maurice (Adult) Phil Jervis
Maurice (Child) Ryan Simons
Director: Amanda J. Smith
Animation director: John Barber
Designers: Liz Osbourne, Martin Paling, Lynette Hartgill
Lighting/Sound: Dominic Bell
2002-12-01 23:56:57