Mixing traditional tales from around the world (including the Native American story of the crow who stole the daylight) into a narrative about the necessary balance between day and night and the value of both, Ripstop Theatre’s beautifully titled Luminous Tales is billed as a ‘gentle journey through the darkness of night, over the light of the moon and back in time for bed’ that uses shadow play and storytelling.
Presented under the auspices of Escalator East to Edinburgh, usually a mark of quality, and the Norwich Puppet Theatre, no less, with company endorsements from renowned puppeteer Luis Z Boy, I had high hopes of seeing a children’s show of exceptional quality but sadly this wasn’t the case.
In the interests of fairness, I saw the first show of the Edinburgh run, and get-ins are notoriously fast and furious in the Fringe, which might explain the nervous performance and the clunky transitions – for although Zannie Fraser is an experienced puppeteer and performer, she struggled to cope with the enormous demands of managing the many and various props and effects in this one-woman show: screens of various sizes, projected paintings, OHP, shadow puppet hares, glove puppet dogs, hand-held shooting star torches, calico bags that were supposed to capture the blue night-sky (and instead, confusingly, captured the projection of the green trees), etcetera, etcetera.
But beyond this, I disliked her character’s cheery Jackanory/Playaway tone, in particular the cringe-worthy ‘No more night-time’ song and dance. Children’s theatre has moved on so much in recent years, and her tone struck me as dated and a little patronising. Surely part of the remit of children’s theatre is to give young people things they didn’t know they wanted, rather than play to cliché and the lowest common denominator? And I had no idea why this old lady character was dressed in a Mrs Mop housecoat and 1950s style scarf but with trainers. What was this supposed to signify?
Aside from any first-show nerves, the piece seemed, in essence, deeply flawed: the writing was dull as dishwater (prosaic where the publicity copy had been poetic); the dramaturgy all over the place, with the integration of the traditional tales into the narrative clumsy. There were some very odd choices about what to place in shadow and what not, and generally the shadow theatre and puppetry work were disappointing coming from a company with such a solid backing.
On the positive side, the painted and projected landscapes were lovely, I liked the soundscape (at least when it wasn’t competing with the spoken text, of which there was far too much delivered in a nervous frenzy, with not a pause for breath in the whole 45 minutes) and there were some nice visual images – including a rice-cake moon munched to bits, a rubber glove ‘flappy batty thing’, and some entertaining shadow-puppet boxing hares.
Perhaps it’ll settle in for its run, but regardless Luminous Tales sadly isn’t the future for children’s theatre.