King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, Saturday 13 September 2003

THERE’S SOMETHING about the knights of the round table that brings out the theatrical best in Scottish companies. A decade ago, Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum produced one of its most extravagant stagings in the form of Tankred Dorst’s Merlin. Now the children’s company Wee Stories has produced a wonderfully exuberant boy’s-own adventure based on the same Dark Ages legend.

And this time, Wee Stories is not so wee. Thanks to a new consortium of Scotland’s biggest theatres – among them Eden Court, Inverness, and His Majesty’s, Aberdeen – the company has been commissioned to create a show on a scale far larger than the studio pieces on which it has built its reputation.

The good news is that it works. There’s inevitably a certain loss of intimacy once the ever-charming Andy Cannon and his trusty sidekick Iain Johnstone move onto the big stage (none of their running-through-the-audience japes of old), but what’s impressive is that they’ve retained their joyful sense of theatrical innocence.

So yes, they are now joined by a pianist – the droll David Trouton – and a four-strong all-female group of musicians, not to mention a set of giant screens onto which they project Aubrey Beardsley prints, but they do not let any of this upstage the human element of their enterprise.

Case in point: the cornflakes boxes. Lots of them. Cannon uses his memory of collecting cut-out-and-keep knights of the round table from the back of Kellogg’s boxes to brilliantly theatrical effect. The tottering pile of cereal packets brought on by Johnstone at the start of the show become a parade of knights, then Stonehenge, then – with a pair of scissors and a Blue Peter-like dexterity – armoured helmets . . . and so on.

There’s an element of dressing-up-box make-believe about this, and that’s an instant connection for a young audience. But it also keeps the company rooted in the theatrical: existing in a world of transformation and imagination, where a table cloth can become Merlin and a couple of boxes on candlesticks can become feuding knights. If only grown-up theatre could be as fleet-footed as this.

The production is very like Trouton’s excellent score: one minute comic (Lancelot’s Song refers to the knight being courageous “yet in touch with his feminine side”), the next minute tense and atmospheric (not least in the dramatic Carmina Burana finale). Cannon is similarly chirpy, self-deprecating and deeply serious.

It makes for a hugely enjoyable show – and genuinely one for all the family – the only casualty being the character analysis, which is almost completely lacking. I left with the odd feeling of being unsure what it was about Arthur that was meant to be so special.

Arthur can be seen at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, Tuesday 7–Saturday 11 October 2003

© Mark Fisher, 2003