Bootworks' Black Box Theatre has a maximum seating capacity of two – as long as one of you is happy to sit on the other's lap. My eight year-old friend Oliver was fine with that, although I thought he might find me a bit heavy.
The auditorium's proportions are slightly less generous than a Travelodge wardrobe. It is, obviously, black in there. Voices and music emerge from a speaker above your head. Three shuttered windows at eye level open and close in an unpredictable sequence to reveal a dramatisation of Oliver Jeffers' rich and lovely picture-book about Henry, who gets smarter and smarter by eating books but finds that it plays hell with his digestion so settles for reading them instead.
I feel a little like Henry: I'm in Edinburgh to talk about my own new book, Life: An Exploded Diagram, but the glory of the book festival is that there is so much else on its doorstep. So after several days of talking and hearing about books, I settled for watching one instead.
The show runs for five minutes, which is long enough if you've got a grown-up on your lap. And it is utterly, sometimes alarmingly, consistently magically, wonderful. Bootworks pop into their windows puppetry, back-projection, masks, exquisite little models, animation and live acting. (My favourite moment was when Henry spewed a confetti of letters into our laps.)
Even if you know the book it is continually surprising. In fact, that's the point; this show doesn't merely offer a version of a book, it dramatises, defamiliarises, the act of reading. If I've ever experienced a more enjoyable five minutes, it would involve nothing I'm willing to confess to.
Bootworks run these ingeniously beautiful little performances back-to-back for four hours each day. Only three days left now; get in there if you can. If you can't, look out next year for Bootworks at a festival anywhere near you.
The Incredible Book-eating Boy runs at The Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, every six minutes between 10.20am and 2.14pm until August 29.
