Mother, father, grandfather, big sister and little brother dance around the bed singing Happy Birthday. Malcolm anticipates the present of his dreams, “a FZY Apache 321, hi-def screen, 4.0 GHz processor speed laptop with quad speakers and Nahimic virtual surround sound”. What he gets is a chinchilla. Malcolm isn’t happy (“I don’t love him”). Traumatised by “the monkey moment” at the zoo when he was six (it involved poo), he just doesn’t get his family’s mad love for animals (as he sings in a number rhyming “very thorough” with “David Attenborough”). A school trip to Orwell Farm, an encounter with a Himalayan goat called K-Pax and... Enough! No spoilers! Not everyone has read the award-winning 2017 David Baddiel novel on which this cheery new musical (score by David Perkins) is based.
Adam Fletcher-Forde’s adaptation for children’s company Story Pocket Theatre follows the book’s story fairly faithfully – perhaps too faithfully; more a copy of Baddiel’s playful narrative than its full translation into stage action (Fletcher-Forde co-directs with Julia Black). Interest is strongly visual. The six-strong cast, aided by Jacqueline Trousdale’s imaginative costume designs, deftly metamorphoses into an entertaining menagerie of variously shell-bearing, hoofed (cloven and not), woolly, feathered and poo-throwing creatures. Actor-manipulated puppets further boost animal numbers, while points of view are multiplied by black-and-white animations of drawings by Jim Field (illustrator of the book). At the heart of the tale, Adam Colborne as Malcolm cannily balances bewilderment, disquiet and excitement in just the right proportions to engage a young audience (and adults too).
