Hi-diddly-dee, an actor's life for me. One minute you're playing the keyboard player in a Joy Division biopic, the next you are flopping around the stage as a boy-puppet. We'll have to wait until next year to see how James Anthony Pearson shapes up in Anton Corbijn's Control, but if he's half as good as he is as Pinocchio, it'll be a fine film indeed.
Relying only on a smooth, black plastic hairpiece to suggest his puppet qualities, Pearson is a bundle of energy whose misdemeanours are caused as much by his innocence as his wickedness. Scarcely has he come to life in Geppetto's workshop than he's blaming the old man for his crimes. But although the puppet shows a callous disregard for his father's imprisonment, his real problem is an ignorance of cause and effect.
In returning to Collodi's original, writer-director Mark Thomson bypasses more sanitised interpretations to present a grand metaphor for our passage from immaturity to adulthood. With each new temptation, Pinocchio comes a step closer to self-realisation, but the closer he gets, the harder the journey gets.
For these reasons, the Lyceum has stressed the darkness of this telling - although it's never as bleak as the Visible Fictions staging a few years ago in which the puppet was hanged. By allowing the story to run its course, Thomson shows how Pinocchio acquires his humanity only by proving himself at the point of greatest danger. By risking everything in the belly of the whale so Geppetto may survive, he forfeits his puppet life to be reborn in human form.
Robert Innes Hopkins' back-to-basics set supports the story-telling ethos, but there's nothing worthy about Thomson's production. It's a knock-about adventure with notably funny performances from Molly Innes and Andrew Clark.
· Until December 30. Box office: 0131-248 4848.
