If you're looking for a show for young children this Christmas in Manchester, your choices are extremely limited, as none of the central Manchester venues offer anything other than pantos except for Aviva Studios, which has dedicated its huge Hall to a new adaptation of a picture book by wonderful Irish author and illustrator Oliver Jeffers.
In this story, the Boy (Richard Hay), who features in a number of Jeffers's books, answers a knock at his front door to find a Penguin (a very physically expressive Lydia Baksh) on his doorstep, which then starts to follow him around. He takes it to the Lost Property office, but no one has reported it lost, but he can't bear to leave it there, so he looks up in a book where penguins come from: the South Pole. He fails to get a lift on a large ship, so gets out his rowing boat and decides to row Penguin back home himself. But is this what Penguin wants, and is it really lost after all?
It's a lovely little tale that has already been made, very effectively (if a little overly detailed in the narration), into a half-hour animated film, which made a few changes and elaborations to the 27-page picture book to flesh out the story. Will Brenton's stage adaptation is more faithful to the book but runs for nearly twice as long, and can feel a little disjointed at times.
The set and costume design (Jean Chan) and the animation on the rear screen (Keyframe Studios) brilliantly bring Jeffers's drawings to three-dimensional life, sometimes showing different things entirely and sometimes acting together to add depth to the stage picture, for instance when Jeffers's bulbous trees begin life-sized on stage and continue on the screen into the distance.
There are some wonderful set-piece designs that echo the book's illustrations almost exactly, such as the Boy in his giant bathtub with the reflective 'water' surface, or the ginger-haired Lost Property man with the extending arms (that bit isn't in the book). There are small puppet versions of the two main characters which are only used rarely—I would have liked to see more of them—but look exactly like they do in the book, for instance in the scene by the lighthouse when they are trying to hitch a ride on the gigantic ship, and when they are being tossed about in their little rowing boat on the fabric waves during a storm.
Both the book and the film are entirely narrated, with no dialogue at all, but in this version, Boy has almost all the lines to carry the story, which means he can't have any kind of head or mask to look more like the puppet or book version of the character. While there are some great moments, the transitions between the scenes are sometimes longer than the scenes themselves; even though music and movement is used during them, it still breaks up the flow of the story to make it feel very bitty. According to his programme biog, director Brenton's main experience is in TV—he regularly directs for Eastenders, Emmerdale and Hollyoaks and co-created The Tweenies—where it is possible to cut between scenes more quickly than on stage.
The stars of the show are definitely the seagulls operated by the ensemble (Susie Barnett, Gus Barry, Ronan Cullen, Pena Ityambo, Gemma Khawaja and Rayo Patel), which are flying around both levels of the auditorium before the start and bring their quirky, naughty personalities into several scenes. There is audience participation, when we had to find bits of the Boy's boat scattered around the stage and auditorium, and when someone from the audience had to get up on stage to give the boat a push to get it going.
Gruff Rhys's music adds to the atmosphere and links everything together well. The songs—including "I've Got This" and "The Lonely Penguin's Friendship Song"—don't add much to the storytelling, but they do amplify some of the messages.
It's great to see that Manchester's newest theatre is not only supporting these often neglected young audiences, largely ignored in Manchester this year, but is prepared to put considerable resources into developing new large-scale work especially for them. And it would seem, from the full auditorium of parties of children enthusiastically shouting and joining in at the morning press performance, it could well be paying off for them.