THEATRE REVIEW: The Big Enormous Present, Minerva Theatre, Chichester
Allowing diminutive theatregoers to get right up close to the action, the intimacy of the Minerva makes it the perfect space for children's theatre.
In The Pied Piper Theatre Company's latest production, which unfolds on a simple set dominated by the colossal prop of the title, the close proximity to the stage had five-year-old Lily and Rory spellbound even before the play started, enthusiastically speculating on what might be contained within the brightly coloured box. A dragon? Loads of Lego? Millions of sweets?
There's only one present that Polly really wants: her Dad back from Afghanistan, safe and sound. While the playground ribbing about her hand-knitted clothes and lack of material possessions upsets her, she has a far greater worry to occupy her thoughts.
When adults play kids the result can be clumsy and affected, but a talented cast of three perfectly captured the energy and charm of primary school children.
Roxanne Sali as Dot and David Barnes as Jack were engaging and appealing as the chums who don't realise just how lucky they are.
The pair also played all the adult roles; people to whom the sweet and selfless Polly (a beautifully judged performance from Yvie Magee) is so kind.
Exploring the trials of fitting in, while underscoring the point that sometimes giving really is more joyous than receiving, the conclusion for young audience members is both warm and happy.
For grown-ups with grimmer knowledge of the ghastly human cost of the ongoing troubles in Afghanistan it brought a lump to the throat and a dampness to the eye.
Exciting, funny and deeply poignant, The Big Enormous Present was an absolute gift.
Published Date: 16 November 2009 by Vicky Edwards
The Big Enormous Present
Polly is not like the other children. She lives with her gran, who sleeps in the same room as her and often wakes her at night with the sound of her knitting. Jack and Dot make up unkind rhymes about the click-clack of the knitting needles. Polly tries to join in.
Throughout the course of the play, we learn that she doesn’t see much of her father, that he is away, that he drives a tank, that he is in Afghanistan. At the same time we learn that she is a very kind little girl. A big present arrives in the school playground that turns out to be for Polly, much to Jack and Dot’s chagrin.
It is full of smaller gifts and as Polly opens each present, she finds someone else who would benefit and gives them away.
Polly, of course, shows her friends - which Jack and Dot become - that the best present of all doesn’t have to be a material thing.
Tina Williams’ delightful script, aimed at three to eight-year-olds, makes much use of rhythm and rhyme and repetition, but she has a deftness of touch with language that makes this exploration of giving and receiving and friendship subliminal rather than overt. Yvie Magee, David Barnes and Roxanne Saili, under Lawrence Evans’ direction, cleverly convey the scattergun exuberance of the pre-teen years and the shifting dynamics of children in the playground in an entertaining way.
Published Monday 4 January 2010 at 10:40 by Graham Gurrin
