Theatre: The Snow

By Finegan Kruckemeyer

Barking Gecko Theatre Company

Directed by Adam Mitchell

Designed by Zoe Atkinson, Lucy Birkinshaw and Cathie Travers

Performed by Grace Chow, Charlotte Otton, Andrea Gibbs, Isaac Diamond and Cathie Travers

STC Studio Until July 15

Charlotte Otton and Grace Chow

I made the fatal error of going to the opening night of Barking Gecko’s latest foray into the fertile imagination of the prolific Tasmanian playwright for (mainly) kids, Finegan Kruckemeyer, without my infallible wriggle-meter.

It’s all very well for all-grown-up audiences to enjoy and appreciate theatre for the young because so much of it – and particularly Kruckemeyer’s – keeps a weather eye on what tickles the adults the kids are taking care of as well.

But the missing wriggle-meter is the real test. Are the kids engaged, entranced and a little bit naughty? Are they shifting in their seats, have they got an endless stream of questions for mum or granddad? Are they bored? Has the play lost them, or are they happily lost in it?

The Snow has got plenty going for it. Kruckemeyer’ s allegory of how distrust, ignorance and rusted-on enmity is like snow that won’t melt is neatly imagined and just as neatly staged by director Adam Mitchell and his feisty and talented performers Grace Chow, Charlotte Otton, Andrea Gibbs and Isaac Diamond, accompanied by the outstanding accordionist Cathie Travers.

It staging is inventive, with multiple chuckleworthy characters drawn by Gibbs and Diamond, a crafty set-in-a-roadcase design by Zoe Atkinson and lashings of clever and entertaining puppeteering and size-shifting magic.

In its “simple story” (Mitchell’s own words), the young, little Thea (the kinetic Chow), the silent, mysterious and much larger Olive (the much loftier Otton) and a bunch of local heroes are catapulted away from the permanently snowbound village of Kishka (pop. 200) and over their despised rival, snowbound too, village of Gretaville (pop. also 200) to find a solution to their white, cold, obstinate problem.

After many adventures, overcoming many obstacles and uncovering many surprises, our mismatched champions bring all to rights, heal many old wounds and cause many piles of snow to melt. Because as any kid’ll tell you, 200 minus 200 comes to nought, while 200 plus 200 is, well, heaps.

The problem is all in the “many”; too much of a good thing is just that, and I suspect there might have been a fair bit of fidgeting and losing the plot going on in a young audience as Thea and Olive’s odyssey plays out.

There are just too many episodes in The Snow, too many pieces to fit into the jigsaw to finish the picture (for example, there’s a drear and dingy district called The Darkness that the characters seem unable to avoid and keep diving into without much rhyme or reason).

None of which detracts from the craft of the production, the energy of its performances or the worthwhile messages The Snow delivers. And none of it makes Finegan Kruckemeyer less than a master of stage writing for all us kids. It’s just something a little less than the sum of too many parts.

And I’m sure that’s what the wriggle-meter would have said.     

 

 

Theatre: My Robot (★★★½ )

By Finegan Kruckemeyer

Barking Gecko Theatre Company

Directed by Matt Edgerton

Designed by Ilsa Shaw

Lighting design by Chris Donnelly

Composer and sound designer by James Luscombe

Robot designer Steve Berrick

Performed by Arielle Gray, St John Cowcher and Sarah Nelson

State Theatre Centre Studio

Until November 28

So much of children’s theatre – of all theatre really – is about the journey from here to there, from the unbearable past to a desirable future.

One of the things that makes the extraordinarily fecund Finegan Kruckemeyer’s My Robot different and interesting is that when the play starts its hero, the feisty, ever-so-slightly nerdish Ophelia (Arielle Gray) has already arrived at her destination – and she’s not at all happy about it.

She has just moved to the seaside with her parents (St John Cowcher is her father and all the show’s other characters – we never meet her mother) and while dad is thrilled by their new surroundings, Ophelia pines for the mountains and friends of their former home.

The play’s other point of difference is right there in the title. A functioning robot character called Olivetti (designed by Steve Berrick and wrangled by Sarah Nelson) is Ophelia’s sidekick and lifeline.

She finds Olivetti – or the pieces that will make it up – in a box in a dumbwaiter that connects her room to the café below owned by the haughty, censorious Ms Ogilvie.

Ogilvie’s stink eye isn’t the only challenge Ophelia faces. There’s the town bully, Otis, who wants to cajole her into admiring the seaside town while trying to get her out of it. And there’s her neighbour, Orson, whose allergies and agoraphobia shut him up in his room away from life.

But Ophelia isn’t easily daunted, and once she puts her toolkit to work and builds Olivetti, she’s a force to be reckoned with. As is the little robot, whose powers of telekinesis elicited gasps of delight from the young (and not so young) audience.

Things proceed in typically engaging Kruckemeyer fashion, with all the real set backs and hard-won triumphs he is a master of, until Ophelia, in true Grace Bussell style, daringly affects a rescue from the wild sea and brings everyone and everything to a highly satisfying conclusion.

There’s no beating Arielle Gray if you want feist, adorability and that pinch of nerdiness, and Cowcher shows yet again what a terrific character actor he is. They are both stars, and its wonderful to see them so committed in a show for children. Barking Gecko’s award-winning production values are all on show (Isla Shaw's storybook design, with Chris Donnelly’s lighting and James Luscombe’s music and sound), and Matt Edgerton directs the whole process with precision and ease.

It would have been nice if the budget could have stretched to a second character actor to create more colour and movement (and maybe allow mum to make an appearance), and Olivetti, achievement as it was, was a little cumbersome to excite an audience used to R2D2 and its lively successors.

Those minor issues aside, My Robot comfortably clears the bar set by what now must be regarded as Australia’s leading theatre company for children and young people. We should be grateful for having them here.

   

Theatre: Those Who Fall in Love Like Anchors Dropped Upon the Ocean Floor

By Finegan Kruckemeyer
Jo Morris and theMOXY collective
Directed by Adam Mitchell
Designed by India Mehta
Lighting design Chris Donnelly
Sound design Ben Collins
Starring Jo Morris, Renée Newman-Storen and Ben Mortley
Blue Room Theatre until 29 November

Jo Morris (l) Ben Mortley and Renée Newman-Storen

It’s a name to take seriously, despite itself. I don’t mean Those Who Fall in Love Like Anchors Dropped Upon the Ocean Floor so much as its writer, the extravagantly-monikered Finegan Kruckemeyer.
There are many of the good things about children’s theatre in Twifilladutoff, despite its decidedly adult themes and content. Four stories fold across each other over time and space. Each glitters with humour, but a melancholy hangs over them. Love, for all these characters, is as elusive as it is fundamental; life devours both itself and any fool who dares to tell the time. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian.

Theatre: Boats

By Finegan Kruckemeyer

Terrapin Puppet Theatre, for the Awesome Festival
Director: Frank Newman
Composer : Matthew Fargher
Set and Puppet Design : Greg Methé
Costume Design : Roz Wren

Performed by Quinn Griggs and Brett Rogers

Perth Cultural Centre

Until October 9

Quinn Griggs and Brett Rogers

It’s exciting to be back at Awesome, the arts festival for children (or, as its disarming director, Jenny Simpson, aptly brands them, “bright young things”) that runs through the October school holidays and into the spring term in and around the Perth Cultural Centre.

For me, it began with a real highlight: Boats, a rollicking sailors’ yarn by Tasmania’s Terrapin Puppet Theatre. The show was inadvertently involved in controversy at last year’s Helpmann Awards when our own Barking Gecko’s The Red Tree was mistakenly announced as the winner of the children’s theatre gong at the ceremony instead of it, but there’s no doubt that Boats was a more than worthy winner.

The awesomely prolific children’s playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer’s story is a complete adventure for kids, with shipwrecks and circuses, loves lost and found, mateship, and, above all, the irresistible siren song of the sea.

The telling of the tale, directed by Frank Newman, is just as impressive. The performers, Quinn Griggs and Brett Rogers, create sound effects like cinema’s Foley artists (the twisting of a leather belt become the creaking of a ship in a gale; air escaping from a balloon becomes the cry of sea birds). Its visual effects take shape from things seemingly lying about the stage: a knotted length of rope becomes the gull of good omen that flies over the sailor Jof (Griggs); two china cups become the kindly old fisherman, Okinawa Yukio (“age was a wave washing him overboard”), who leaves his boat to the young seafarer. It’s all wondrously inventive, with the deep humour of sudden imaginative discovery that is the greatest gift of theatre for children.

Rogers is an adept narrator of the play’s aquatic occurrences, as well as playing Jof’s offsider, Nic, his sweetheart, Eliza Turk, and other characters, and Griggs is an absolute marvel. His long, twinkling face (you’ve got to be reminded of the Welsh comic Rob Bryden), expressive voice and tough-as-teak body make him any kid’s first mate.

The bright young things with me were rising four (I cheated – the program advises five and up) and 10. The youngster laughed out loud, opened her eyes wide and got fidgety only towards the end of the show’s 50 minutes; her big brother took it all in shrewdly, leaning over to get me to write “very clever” in my notes.

So it was, and much more besides.   

An edited version of this review appeared in The West Australian 7.10.13

Theatre: This Girl Laughs, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing

By Finegan Kruckemeyer

Barking Gecko Theatre Company

Directed by Noel Jordan

Designed by Alicia Clements, Quincy Grant and Trent Suidgeest

Performed by Ella Hetherington, Jo Morris, Sarah Nelson and Drayton Morley

Subiaco Arts Centre

Until July 21

Ella Hetherington, Jo Morris and Sarah Nelson

The most important thing is always the telling of the story; children demand imagination and clarity, and adults deserve it. This is the secret of fables and fairy stories, and it’s the standard by which theatre for children can best be judged.

By that measure, and plenty of others beside, Barking Gecko’s show for these school holidays, This Girl Laughs, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing, was a genuinely enjoyable experience for the parents, grandparents and stray adults in the audience. For the kids (the play is recommended for six-year-olds and up), I turned to the infallible wriggle-meter, and the needle swung well away from “Bored and Restless” to the “Got ‘Em” end of the dial after a bit of customary early shuffling, and despite a little impatience towards the end (the play might be just a smidgen long).

As always with kids, the more their imagination is engaged, the more their interest is aroused. The fabulous scenes where Morris’s Beatrix’s lighthouse ship, made from a lantern, a bucket and a whisk, sails away to adventure, and where Hetherington’s fierce Albienne, full of Joan of Arc-like martial ardour, fights off the invaders with flour and ice-cream scoops, had them especially gripped and entranced. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian