Having previously brought their signature inventiveness to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with their adaptation of M R James’s Casting the Runes, which is also featuring this year, Box Tale Soup has returned with a reworking of Jonathan Swift’s eternally brilliant satire Gulliver’s Travels.
Noel Byrne takes on the part of the beleaguered and restless mariner, who finds himself on a ludicrous odyssey from one strange nation to the next. As is the company style, many of the parts and scenes are accomplished through the use of fragments of props, bespoke puppets and pieces of scenery, endlessly and ingeniously repurposed into new devices or characters.
Most of the familiar lands are here, mercifully condensed into a single voyage rather than the arduous and implausible repeated voyages of the book. But in doing so, we lose something of the point of the book. Although there are still staple dichotomies such as the Lilliputian egg-end debacle and the topsy-turvy land of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos where men live as savages and wise horses rule, there doesn’t seem to be a message or a theme to it all.
Ultimately, this is a well put together, very entertaining piece of theatre and a good adaptation of the story, but also one that feels slightly unsatisfying by the time we reach the back end. This is in part a limitation of the source material, but also simply in not bringing the whole to a conclusion that fits the choices made up until that point. It’s a good offering, but stands a little short next to the brilliance of the other play they are performing.