OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, 2 May 2009

Shopping For Shoes

THIS DECEPTIVELY simple teenage love story has been wonderfully crafted by Douglas Irvine into a mixture of gigantic shoe-boxes and inspired talent to produce an imaginative and thought-provoking play.

Written by Tim Crouch for Visible Fictions, the production had its debut in 2006, where it played at the Bank of Scotland Children’s International Theatre Festival and enjoyed much success. This time round Shopping for Shoes was back to appeal to its ten-to-sixteen year old target audience in Inverness.

Rosalind Sydney (or Ros, as she introduced herself to us) is the star in this one ‘woman’ cast and she holds her own throughout as she delivers to us, with much exuberance, the story of Siobhan and Shaun. Both are 13, but this is where the similarities appear to end, since Siobhan spends her nights signing Greenpeace petitions online, whereas Shaun is passionate about only one thing – his tremendous collection of shoes consisting in all of about 60 pairs!

Even I have to admit – as a fond lover of shoes myself – that perhaps 60 is a little excessive, but Shaun doesn’t mind. To him they represent his identity as he proclaims along with the Nike Logo: Just Do It.

Part of Siobhan’s heart, as the script so gracefully puts it, belongs to Shaun, and like all good love stories, with a little bit of delicate scheming she is able to show him that there is more to life than shoes, and that they can do a lot more than just identify you.

To top all this off the show is made more unique by its use of mainly props to tell the story; inside each of Mark Leese’s over-sized shoe-boxes there are a pair of shoes representing a character.

The script is eloquent and above all simple, with its message clear and uncomplicated, and even the most cynical of audience members would be hard pushed not to be drawn into the magic which Shopping for Shoes creates out of the most ordinary of events.

Its contemporary tune makes it quite timeless and its wish to strive against “once upon a time” storytelling means that all in all it is super little piece of “now” theatre with humour, wit and charm throughout.

© Jo Gratton, 2009

Links

• Visible Fictions