Maybe it’s because it feels a bit like a circus - with its woodchip-strewn ring of a playing space. Maybe it’s the relaxed atmosphere, with people sharing picnics during the performance. Whatever the reason, this temporary open-air venue is always fun to be in. Each summer a new rep company builds on its distinctly intimate rapport between stage and auditorium for evening Shakespeares and family matinees.
The director of Stig, Derek Bond, plays to the venue’s advantages. Props are thrust into spectators’ hands so that actors can squiggle unimpeded through lengths of broken piping that evoke the eponymous dump; spectacles are snatched from one spectator’s face by the eight-year-old hero, Barney (played by recently graduated Anton Cross), who uses them as a disguise to bamboozle pursuers. There is a powerful sense that this act of theatre is something we are all joining together to make - watchers and performers. This is magical.
That said, I found Jessica Swale’s adaptation distinctly unmagical, especially in its reworking of the relationship between Barney and the caveman, Stig, he has discovered living at the bottom of the dump. In Clive King’s 1963 novel, man and boy both benefit by exchanging skills and knowledge. Here, their exchange is mostly one-sided, with the child introducing “primitive” man to technological advances. Having Stig represented by a Muppet-like puppet with cloth hands (created and directed by Michael Fowkes) also blunts their interactions. King’s intriguing, mysterious, human is reduced to an entertaining creature.
• At Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre, Chester, until 21 August
