2004
Fluff
Created by Christine Johnston
Strut and Fret Productions
Artspace, Festival Centre
The Flying Babies
by Jakub Krofta
Drak Theatre
Dunstan Playhouse
Windmill Productions marked a second birthday last month and they continue to live up to their claim as a leading national theatre company for young people. They have not been without their blips – last year’s Robinson Crusoe was undistinguished and The Snow Queen faltered under the sheer weight of its grandiose intentions. But this year’s Moonfleet, a charming co-production with Mount Gambier-based Mainstreet Theatre, and the Adelaide Festival project Riverland, based on the paintings of Ian W. Abdulla, marked a very considerable return to form.
Windmill has called its current double bill- “a mini celebration for little people.” The target age of three to eight years means these shows are for very young audiences and that requires just the right mix of colour, movement and meaningful content. Performance artist Christine Johnston is an interesting choice for a children’s theatre project, but Fluff is also a marked shift from such previous work as her sardonic Decent Spinster.
The program notes give us a clue – “Fluff presents a day in the life of a strange but caring woman and her helpers who run a home for lost toys.” Strange but caring ? cruel but unusual ? And when the imposingly tall Johnston enters, along with the diminutive Lisa O’Neill, we know for sure we are in for postmodern zany. In black and white gingham and black wigs they look like Amish with B-52s.
The premise of the show is fun. Lost and broken toys – teddies with button eyes, bedraggled bunnies, geeky looking octopi – are being rescued from suburban war zones and put in a little ward of wooden beds. The set is a fabulously kitsch installation of dozens of toys arrayed on shelves, many pulsing with double-AA illumination. A video screen re-enacts the crash tests – Humpty caught in rugby scrum, the eponymous Fluff disappearing into the dustbuster – while musician Peter Nelson provides brightly cheesy keyboard flourishes. For some welcome. audience interaction, Johnston collects frog and chook noises from the kids which Nelson reprocesses through his computer.
The use of theme music for each of the toys is a clever device, with the children showing speedy recognition skill. But the campness of the style – Johnston serenading a woeful looking soft toy with The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face – and the overwrought business of putting the noisy toys to sleep, starts to pall. “I didn’t really like that bit” announces a five year old to no-one in particular and some bemused parents seem to agree.
No-one wants bland shows for kids, but high concept stuff like this also has its perils. In pitching jokes over the children’s heads, you need to be sure that they are going to land safely with their parents. It is good to have a bit of offbeat fun, even for very young audiences, but, with the aptly named Fluff, Christine Johnston and her talented collaborators don’t seem quite as geared to entertaining their audience as they are to pleasing themselves.
From the Czech Republic, Drak Theatre’s pantomine, The Flying Babies is on safer ground – or rather, suspended joyfully above it. Like a goofy cartoon, three babies in big padded calico costumes and armed with umbrellas, turn their oversize wicker pram into a rocket and travel through the solar system. The narrative is clear and the stage effects delightfully daft. Simple light projections, and sound effects create a playful comedy effortlessly managed by performers Petra Cicakova, Radomil Vavra and Milan Zdarsky.
The Flying Babies is a reminder that imaginative works don’t divide an audience, they unite them. None of us knows what goes on in babies’ minds as they roll around on their ample bottoms – even though that was us, once. That they are planning to travel through space is both preposterous and appealingly whimsical and, with the gentle visual wit of director Jacub Krofta and designer Marek Zakostelecky, we see The Flying Babies rise well above the usual altitude of children’s theatre.
The Adelaide Review, No.251, August, 2004, p.25.