The Stage

Shopping For Shoes

Published Thursday 25 May 2006 at 15:25 by Thom Dibdin

Douglas Irvine has taken Tim Crouch’s deceptively simple story of teenage love, mixed in Mark Leese’s inspired set of over-sized shoe-boxes and come up with a sturdy production for Visible Fictions at the Bank of Scotland Children’s International Theatre Festival, fleet of foot and more than ready to take on any audience in its ten to 16-year-old target market.

Angela Darcy is engaging in the storytelling role, giving enough in the show’s preamble to allow even the most cynical the opportunity to go along with her. But it is when she starts to move the boxes around with the light touch of a prestidigitator and open them to reveal the shoes inside - or more specifically the people who wear them - that she and the piece of theatre itself begin to weave their magic.

The brilliance of script and production is that its ‘once upon a time’ is emphatically now. The tunes which 13-year-old Siobhan hums on the way to the bus stop and the raps which class-mate Shaun poses around to as he admires his Nike Air Jordans in his specially designed mirrors, are (and can always be), this week’s music. The language they use and their changing feelings for each other will not date. Their characters might have their roots in Greek myth (think Echo and Narcissus) but Siobhan’s environmental concerns and Shaun’s belief in the power of trainers to express a person’s identity are both universal and contemporary. Without making a big deal, a momentous occasion of conflict and resolution is created with charm and candour.