Shoe Baby

Published Tuesday 22 August 2006 at 17:40 by Thom Dibdin

There’s a home-made charm to Polly Dunbar and Katherine Morton’s puppets for this adaptation of Joyce Dunbar’s children’s book - originally illustrated by Polly herself. Talking shoes left in the bottom of a cupboard - from which the Shoe Baby can emerge - a delightful rolling backdrop through the city on the way to the zoo and, once there, a pair of singing giraffe arm puppets. It is all inventive stuff, a rag-bag octopus supported on the skeleton of an umbrella is particularly so, with plenty to feast the eyes upon.

That charm is counterbalanced by a similarly home-made feel to the show’s pacing. There’s a very pleasant lullaby-like guitar and voice soundtrack from Gomez’s Tom Gray. But all too often the songs are still going on when the puppeteers have run out of things to do for that particular scene. Which does leave space for the two to five-year-olds in the audience to discuss what they have seen.

It is still an involving enough world for the arrival of a giant to be really rather scary. Even if he has lost a shoe. And when he comes out in front of the puppet stage, he is not scary at all.