Caol Community Centre, by Fort William, 17 September 2008, and touring

Andy Cannon and Iain Johnstone (photo - Billy Fox)

IN ITS SECOND collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland, Wee Stories is boldly going where no children’s theatre company has gone before. That’s not only because of its successful marriage of entertainment, visual surprises and education, but also because of its stand against religious dogma.

Performer Iain Johnstone doesn’t go quite as far as denouncing God, but he is unequivocal in blaming the church for hampering the development of our knowledge about the universe. And it’s not every children’s show that does that.

His starting point is a personal story about his son having to do a homework project on the moon. He realises that it’s nearly 40 years since, as a 10-year-old himself, he watched Neil Armstrong set foot upon our nearest neighbour. He also realises how patchy his own knowledge of the solar system is and sets about investigating.

What he discovers is that before Armstrong could make his giant leap for mankind, many people had to make their own giant leaps in understanding what was going on in space. This meant throwing out the old ideas about the heavenly bodies being gods, and figuring out what was really going on.

The riddle was cracked as long ago as 200BC when Aristarchos of Samos suggested we were going around the sun and not the other way around, but as empires fell and libraries burned, his ideas failed to catch on. By the time Copernicus caught up with the theory in the 16th century, it was a heresy to believe the Earth was not the still centre of a perfectly circling universe, as the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno found out to his cost when he was burned at the stake.

We laugh when Johnstone’s collaborator David Trouton gets us to join in a plainsong chant of “The Earth is at the centre of the universe and does not move,” but we also see how debilitating the church’s grip on human knowledge was.

This makes One Giant Leap an unusually chewy children’s show; not just a celebration of the wonder of space, but a philosophical journey through human thought. Wee Stories, however, is adept at making light work of big ideas and, thanks to enthusiastic contributions from actor Andy Cannon, a magical blackboard on which chalk stars can move and a self-deprecating sense of humour, the show gives perspective not only to the universe, but the human race too.

© Mark Fisher, 2008

Links

• Wee Stories
• National Theatre of Scotland
• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog