2004<\/p>\n
Fluff<\/p>\n
Created\u00a0 by Christine Johnston<\/p>\n
Strut and Fret Productions<\/p>\n
Artspace, Festival Centre<\/p>\n
The Flying Babies<\/p>\n
by Jakub Krofta<\/p>\n
Drak Theatre<\/p>\n
Dunstan Playhouse<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Robinson Crusoe<\/em> was undistinguished and The Snow Queen<\/em> faltered under the sheer weight of its grandiose intentions. But this year\u2019s Moonflee<\/em>t, a charming\u00a0 co-production with Mount Gambier-based Mainstreet Theatre, and the Adelaide Festival project Riverland<\/em>, based on the paintings of Ian W. Abdulla, marked\u00a0 a very considerable return to form.<\/p>\n Windmill has called its current double bill-\u00a0 \u201ca mini celebration for little people.\u201d\u00a0 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\u2019s theatre project, but Fluff<\/em> is also a marked shift\u00a0 from such previous work as her sardonic Decent Spinster<\/em>.<\/p>\n The program notes give us a clue – \u201cFluff<\/em> presents a day in the life of a strange but caring woman and her helpers who run a home for lost toys.\u201d Strange but caring ? cruel but unusual ? And when the imposingly tall Johnston enters, along with the diminutive Lisa O\u2019Neill, 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> – and the overwrought business of putting the noisy toys to sleep, starts to pall. \u201cI didn\u2019t really like that bit\u201d announces a five year old to no-one in particular and some bemused parents seem to agree.<\/p>\n No-one wants bland shows for kids, but high concept stuff like this also has its perils. In pitching jokes over the children\u2019s 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<\/em>, Christine Johnston and her talented collaborators don\u2019t seem quite as geared to entertaining their audience as they are to pleasing themselves.<\/p>\n From the Czech Republic, Drak Theatre\u2019s pantomine, The Flying Babies<\/em> 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\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n The Flying Babies<\/em> is a reminder that imaginative works don\u2019t divide an audience, they unite them. None of us knows what goes on in babies\u2019 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\u00a0 and, with the gentle visual wit of director Jacub Krofta and designer Marek Zakostelecky, we see The Flying Babies<\/em> rise well above the usual altitude of children\u2019s theatre.<\/p>\n The Adelaide Review, No.251, August, 2004, p.25.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 2004 Fluff Created\u00a0 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\u2019s Robinson Crusoe was undistinguished and The Snow Queen faltered under the sheer weight of its grandiose intentions. But this year\u2019s Moonfleet, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,5,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adelaide-companies","category-archive","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1454"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1455,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1454\/revisions\/1455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}