Little Wolf’s Book of Badness

Published Thursday 13 December 2007 at 11:55 by Mark Shenton

An apparently subversive message of the goodness of being bad, as a little wolf cub is forced by his parents to struggle with his better nature and attend Cunning College to learn to live up to a wolf’s more fearsome reputation, is given a buoyantly amusing spin that ends up, of course, teaching audiences the opposite lesson.

Hampstead’s home-produced Christmas entertainment both maintains the theatre’s remit for promoting new writing and also demonstrates artistic director Anthony Clark’s particular flair for children’s theatre (that previously won him a TMA Award in 1997) with a show that Clark has himself craftily adapted from 1995 Little Wolf’s Book of Badness to produce a theatrical occasion that is full of goodness.

The key to its success lies in its clear, uncluttered storytelling - with witty songs bouncily propelling both the narrative and helping to maintain the interest of the young audience - but also its theatricality. The actors merely have to don wolf caps, fur collars and tails to give realistically anthropomorphic form to these wild creatures, and as played out on Liz Cooke’s somewhat under-utilised climbing frame of a set dominated by two slides, it springs to superbly animated 3D life.

The cast, some of whom double up as musicians, bring an unpatronising warmth and sincerity to it that creates a genuine sense of engagement between stage and audience, with the large group of young schoolkids I saw it with held rapt throughout.