The latest show in Bobby Baker's Daily Life series ends with an idealised view of childhood, with three scrubbed children sitting around the kitchen table enjoying a tea of strawberries and milk.
What precedes it, however, suggests that childhood is not so idyllic. It is full of unexpected terrors, unpredictable adults, firm mothers who always cope, unprepared fathers who don't, and endless coercion beginning with the line in the school playground. Like her previous work, Baker's piece is slippery, throwaway and deliberately unrounded, and it works largely because of Baker's agreeable amiable persona, here dressed in white with knee-length lace-up boots and a serving spoon slung around her neck.
She is part kindly infant school teacher (if you get scared you can sit on her lap), part dominatrix, part storyteller, part scientist and part intrepid explorer into the adventures of life. The story of the Berry family - Big, Bad and Baby Berry - is an Enid Blyton-type yarn: Three Get Squashed But Bounce Back Again Victorious. It's very 50s. It also gives the audience a chance to go back to school, to line up in the playground, to walk - not run - through the corridors, to squash themselves into chairs that are now far too small and to make strawberry cocktail-stick people and acorn helmets.
It's all quite pointless - which, when you come to think of it, is how a lot of childhood seems. Interspersed are moments of extraordinary adventure and importance: making dams and bursting them, for instance, and encounters with the mouldy Bread Street gang. At only an hour, the piece is as slender as a child's dream and almost as difficult to pin down. But it has an otherworldly charm, and beneath its playful surface lurks the reminder of the fleeting freedom of childhood and of the adult determination to shape and tape.
At a north London primary school (address disclosed on booking) until July 2. Box office: 0171-638 8891.
