Whale, Where Are You Going?
Assembly Rooms, 10.10am, until 24 August
The old man who sits at the centre of this imaginative blend of object theatre and shadow puppetry from Taiwan’s S Production is the cantankerous sort, tied to his routine and resistant to change. His day is an uneventful parade of tasks: teeth brushing, newspaper reading and failing to put his socks on.
It is much to his surprise that he wakes to find the room tidy and his secret box of memories moved. And it is much to his consternation that a boy appears from another box, unruly, undomesticated and curious.
It is that very curiosity that unlocks the old man’s backstory and rejuvenates him. Inside the secret box, the boy finds evidence of a perilous biplane crash over wartime seas and a drowning pilot rescued by a whale.
By my reckoning that would make the old man about 125 years old, which would also account for the old-fashioned Boy’s Own Adventure focus of the show. It is easy to put that aside, however, when mischievous humour and visual inventiveness abounds, whether it is paper planes floating overhead, deathly waves inundating the stage or the enormous blue whale swelling to the full height of the walls around us.
Tactile wonder … toooB
toooB
Pleasance Courtyard, 10am and 11am, until 25 August
I usually take the post-show play session as my cue to leave, but this one is delightful. We have just watched Tamsin Fessey perform a hypnotic dance, aimed at 6-24-month-olds, from inside a colourful tube. Hidden within, she rolls and stretches, giving life to this wriggly creature and making a face of the orange hoop at one end.
Tuning in to the priorities of the young audience, she is variously shy, inquisitive, hungry and sick. She dances when the music demands it and sighs when it stops. She plays games with the springy containers around her and discovers enticing silvery balls inside.
This toooB seems to have a life of her own until, slowly in this wordless production by Angel Exit, attractively designed by Verity Quinn, we spot the performer within: a foot, a hand, a cautious eye. And with her emergence, it is time for the audience to join in: new balls and tubes appearing around us to create an infant adventure playground, full of tactile wonder.
James Joyce for kids … You’ll See …
You’ll See …
Pleasance Courtyard, 12pm, until 24 August
It sounds like a joke. Take a famously impenetrable classic of world literature, a stream-of-consciousness Dublin odyssey stretching to 250,000 words, and turn it into a show for the over-eights. But Helen Gregg is for real and her adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses is a joy.
Introducing a book that few of the adults in the audience will have read, she strips it down to its narrative framework, judiciously editing for family viewing, and turns it into 45 minutes of day-in-the-life storytelling.
Leafing through enormous pop-up books – three of them, just like the sections of the original – she traces the comings and goings of a cut-out Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus, flanked by a city’s worth of quirky characters, from funeral to office to pub. In Marc Mac Lochlainn’s production for Galway company Branar, it is performed with wit and lucidity, not to mention musical interludes. Gregg is a brilliant interpreter and makes an imposing novel sound like a fun thing to tackle at home.
Sensory delight … Hello Birds. Photograph: Neal Megaw
Hello Birds
Assembly George Square, 11.30am, until 17 August
Hard to imagine a more gentle introduction to theatre than this sensory performance for babies, written by Jasmine Cole and directed by Connie Crosby. Narrated by Hannah Platts and performed on a large floorcloth over which the audience can roam, it is set in a garden where the leaves are tactile, the mushrooms rattle and the pond is made of silver foil.
A bee buzzes by as the children acclimatise, then it is time for the big reveal: a sequence of cloth puppet birds, manipulated by Jennie Rawling, introduced with birdsong and welcomed with a pretty human song. Things get no more dramatic than when the starling imitates a cow and a tractor and, as the lights dim, a night owl soars overhead with stars shining through its wings. The stakes might be low, but is pitched perfectly at a mesmerised audience.
Finding ways to connect … The Unlikely Friendship of Feather Boy and Tentacle Girl. Photograph: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan
The Unlikely Friendship of Feather Boy and Tentacle Girl
Assembly Roxy, 11.25am, until 17 August
Feather Boy and Tentacle Girl are opposites. One lives in the city; one in the country. One is rough; the other smooth. One sunny; one sour. But although theirs is a relationship of contradictions, they find a way to connect. They do this through the mutual dependency of acrobatics, balancing high above the stage, moving in careful synchronisation.
In this aerial show for the over-eights by circus artists Vee Smith and Sadiq Ali working with Catherine Wheels theatre company, it is as if the two have been let loose in an outsize play park, mocking gravity as they hang upside down, spin precariously or plummet to the ocean depths. Narratively light and open to interpretation, it reaches a climax with a spectacular storm of red and white feathers on Jen McGinley’s set, swirling in windy chaos.