Review by Mark Fisher
A Sheep Called Skye
9 Oct 2007 in Dance & Drama
Bladnoch Distillery, Wigtown, and touring 2007
Allie Cohen in A Sheep Called Skye.
WHEN CHILDREN’S THEATRE is at its best, it taps into its audience’s imaginative power and defies the boring old rules of the adult world. It has no time for fourth-wall naturalism and will use any technique at its disposal – song, puppetry, direct address – if it means getting the story told.
The team behind ‘A Sheep Called Skye’ clearly realise this, with their woolly puppets, live music and doubling actors, but somehow this National Theatre of Scotland production never takes flight.
The weakest link is the story itself. Adapted by Nicola McCartney from an unsophisticated novel by SR Harris, it is a journey of self-discovery by the pampered Skye who starts to wonder if her life as the only sheep at an island bed-and-breakfast makes her less than the authentic article.
Like a Greek hero of myth, she ventures into the unknown in an attempt to find out who she really is. Except that, unlike a Greek myth, her journey is exceptionally dreary.
She meets a rough-looking Jacob’s sheep from over the next hill before heading south, earning her keep modelling souvenirs for a salesman, meeting a succession of other sheep and eventually returning home.
All of these encounters are free of dramatic tension: no threat, no danger, no challenge beyond the discovery that sheep come in a variety of guises.
It’s true sheep are timid creatures, but this is far too gentle for a target age range of 5-9 year olds (who would be right to feel patronised by Skye’s habit of using a big word, then instantly translating it into simpler terms), and there is no sense of joyous achievement when finally the sheep reaches home and some kind of self-realisation.
Playing the lead role in Andrew Panton’s production, Ailie Cohen is good-natured enough, but the story offers her little emotional range. That also explains why the songs by Jon Beales are so instantly forgettable.
On a Saturday afternoon in Wigtown, I was impressed by how attentive the young audience was, absorbed, presumably, by the procession of characters and puppets emerging from the depths of Becky Minto’s set.
But when there has been so much fantastic theatre for children produced in Scotland in recent years, it is a shame the NTS is backing such an unexceptional piece of work.
© Mark Fisher, 2007
