Curb,Produced by Curious Legends, directed by Mitchell Reese, Gregson Park, Hamilton, Saturday, December 11.
Using theatre to deliver a pertinent message to your audience is never easy. If you are performing before a gaggle of excited but exhausted children then things get even trickier. It takes humour. It takes inventiveness and absurdity. In other words, it takes a 10-foot-tall talking banana peel by twilight.
Or maybe it just takes the vision and the enthusiasm of Curious Legends. It was through the efforts of this local performance collective, guided by artistic director Mitchell Reese, that a peculiar tale came to be told at Hamilton's Gregson Park on Saturday night.
What began as a twee but cleverly engaging piece of animation became a wondrous, illuminated life cycle in technicolour. By the time a mumbling banana seed waddled out, in a shimmery diamond-shaped skin (worn by Samantha Lambert), the kids had been swept up into a kind of pithy, cautionary fable for the age.
Embodying a parade of throwaway scraps with the sprightly kookiness of human movement, these performers urged their audience - even by way of their sheer silliness - to imagine an alternative to indifferent consumerism. It's obviously an important and pertinent message. But it's no less a heavy one for little kids to shoulder after the sun sets.
Which brings us back to the importance of the 10-foot, heterochromic banana peel. How else can you convince a five-year-old, after their bedtime, that your message has a meaning? You have to make it magical and otherworldly. It has to look like something that might have derived from behind their own eyelids - a vivid, lifelike, kaleidoscopic vision that is familiar but also strange. You need a banana that kind of looks like a giant squid, held up by a guy in a cowboy hat. You need a giant plastic bag that looks like an opal has swallowed a rainbow. You need Curious Legends.
The altogether grown-up idea that our rubbish lives a life, from its birth to its repurpose, was a bland truth that this performance translated into a colourful fiction. It was also a translation that had to take place in double time. The confines of a child-like attention span might have also meant that the warmth and light of the figures only briefly reached the edges of the audience. No doubt this was also for reasons of safety, but the barrier between kid and character seemed artificial all the same.
What seemed wholly authentic, even from a distance, was the focus of the troupe and the imagination of the sound and lighting crew. The illustrations and animation delivered charm and sprightly narrative detail. The performers effortlessly navigated the round. If they looked occasionally haphazard then it was probably deliberate. It's always funnier that way.
And when Reese paced about the edges of the audience, checking the positionings like a sport coach on a sideline, it reminded me that looking this whimsical takes hefty quantities of energy. Silliness and absurdity, especially when invented for children, can be a precise and serious business.
