OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 31 August 2009

THE FOUR members of the Little Bulb Theatre Company met at the University of Kent and set out to produce “captivating works of art designed to startle, delight and entertain”. They certainly have with Crocosmia, a play which is as fresh and exhilarating as a cold shower.

Crocosmia by The Little Bulb Theatre

Water indeed abounds, from the thundery, rainy background sound which accompanies much of the action, to the carboy in which a carrot, bitten to represent a pet goldfish, is plunged.

The story is simple. After the death of their loving parents in a car crash, the Brackenberg children – ten year old twins Sophia and Finnley and younger sister Freya, aged seven & three quarters – are sent to an orphanage and put up for adoption.

They try to make sense of their shattered world using their parents’ old LPs, overhead projector slides, and puppetry, most memorably involving cake. In devising the play, the three actors (Shamira Turner, Clare Beresford and Dom Conway) each developed a child persona – as did the director, Alexandra Scott, who remains an unmentioned Cousin Felix during the performance while talking to them.

They remain in that persona even when impersonating their parents, which somehow helps to recreate a true sense of what childhood really feels like at the time; the clearsighted, unflinching view of the foibles of grownups (from which much of the comedy arises) and that endless struggle to make sense of the strange way that grownups think and act, which elicited tears on many a cheek.

Crocosmia often has a whisper of E. Nesbitt’s classic children’s novels (The Woudbegoods, in particular) with a light sprinkle of Enid Blyton – it is evident from the LPs, that the action takes place several decades ago, before any of the company was born. That additional chronological strangeness is part of the evening’s considerable charm.

Fluidly blurring the boundaries between adult and child, reality and fiction, audience and actors, the company succeeds completely in creating a fantasy which is deeply moving without being mawkish, one of the most joyful and life-affirming evenings you are likely to spend in a theatre. Little Bulb Theatre – glowing and growing.

© Jennie Macfie, 2009

Links

• Little Bulb Theatre
• Jennie Macfie