When and how should we start to talk to children about climate change? The Unicorn and Filskit theatre company’s Breaking the Ice, for two-to-five-year-olds, gently presents the issue through the tale of a friendship between a husky and a polar bear – though only the oldest children would pick up its environmental message. The Little Angel’s The Journey Home, adapted from Frann Preston-Gannon’s book and directed by Steve Tiplady, explores the subject for a much broader age range (four to 11). The challenge is to ensure a show that’s entertaining no matter how earnest its message, and that stimulates kids at both ends of that range.
When I arrive at the theatre with Aggie (five and a half), the audience is noticeably sparser than at past Saturday morning performances. In a crowded marketplace of colourful, riotous shows this might be a tricky sell. We haven’t read the book it’s based on, so when Aggie asks what the show is about, I tell her it’s the tale of a polar bear who loses his home. She looks sad. “Are we definitely having an ice-cream?”
Wisely, it all starts with some pratfalls, as our polar-bear hero slips and slides around on three giant ice cubes at the centre of the stage. Like Breaking the Ice, the show finds a simple way of conjuring the Aurora Borealis of the Arctic and quickly establishes the strange sadness of the landscape. Aggie likes the torchlit puppets, including a shimmering fish, and the birds that fly into the audience. And the haunting folk songs and music by Arran Glass, who is also on puppeteering duties with Rachel Leonard, bring a sense of calm to the audience.
But this largely wordless 40-minute show requires children to really pay attention to those lyrics. It’s only when we later go to the library and read the book – in which the animals have clear, explanatory dialogue – that Aggie understands the ins and outs of the story.
When his home begins to melt, the polar bear heads off on a journey in a boat, gradually joined by a panda and an orangutan whose lollypop-stick homes are being chopped down. To depict this destruction, Glass plays a devil-may-care logger, sporting a hard hat and blowing a kazoo whose buzz resembles a chainsaw. It breaks with the show’s predominantly solemn tone and the kids roar with laughter.
The last one into the boat is an elephant, and a subtle series of silhouettes are used to explain the threat of poaching to the species. Older children might read the significance of the crosshair viewpoint in this sequence but Aggie doesn’t register it. When we talk about the show afterwards she doesn’t understand what the elephant is doing in the boat. Anyway, isn’t there at least a little fun to be had with the notion of these eclectic animals sharing a boat, and the nature of their journey itself?
It’s no surprise that this Little Angel production has beautiful puppets. Designed by Sally Todd and made by Michael Fowkes, they look strikingly delicate up close and really do reflect the collage-like illustrations in Preston-Gannon’s book. But the animals never really emerge as individual characters. We don’t care enough about them.
This means the warning struck at the end of the show doesn’t quite chill as it should. The animals are told: “You can go home when the trees grow back and when the ice returns and when the cities stop getting bigger and when the hunting stops.”
The applause dies down and the lights go up. Aggie sighs. “Can we have an ice-cream now?”
- The Journey Home is at the Little Angel theatre, London, until 28 October. Box office: 020-7226 1787.
