A Small Mind At The Theatre

I first saw a show from Munchkins & Monsters during the 2016 local Northampton Umbrella Fair and their lively tale, Back In Time For Breakfast managed to keep an audience enthralled for an hour in a tent on a swelteringly hot August day, so with that achievement under the belt, it was clear they were doing something very right. As it turned out, the day that I saw this, their show entitled The Reluctant Dragon , the temperature wasn't a great deal cooler, but the lack of the tent meant we didn't get quite cook, even if the performers clearly did during this occasionally very energetic show. The scene for the performance is set with a simple and clear staging of sheets with cartoon landscape, and puppets and cardboard towers hinting of what is to come. After the piping in of medieval music as we take our seats, our performers of Dale Forder, Hannah Conway and Laura Richardson take to the stage with all the suitable enthusiasm to try to keep an audience of children captivat...

More possible years have passed than I wish to imagine since my last encounter with Kenneth Grahame's classic tale of the adventures (or misadventures) of a collection of lively, disturbingly human like animals. However as I watched James Smith's new stage adaptation of the tale, many things came swiftly back to me. Here was the classic messing about in the river line, there was the famous "Poop! Poop!", and there was Toad pretending to be a washer woman. The whole thing was pretty much back, if a little abridged to fit into its seventy minute running time. That is not to say that this is a straight adaption for the stage, as it is at times more like a pantomime version of the story (albeit one without any "he's behind you!" business) in its absolute silliness. This is much in keeping of what you tend to get from Looking Glass in any case, a relaxed telling of a classic tale. It's what they are best at and it is very much not broke, so why try to b...