The Stage

Bob, the Man on the Moon

Published Monday 19 April 2010 at 11:15 by Jeremy Brien

West Country children’s theatre companies Sixth Sense Theatre for Young People and Travelling Light have joined forces to stage this imaginative stage version of Simon Bartram’s award-winning book for three year olds and upwards.

Frank Wurzinger in Bob, the Man on the Moon at the Egg Theatre, Bath Photo: Farrows Creative

The plot centres around a rocket pilot named Bob who commutes every day to the moon. Once there, Bob’s jobs include parading his green credentials by cleaning up the space junk left in the moon’s craters and vacuuming up the moon dust.

Physical clown Frank Wurzinger achieves all this with a large and essential element of audience participation from the start. But where the children really come into their own is when Bob begins to insists that, despite his space explorations, there are no such things as space aliens. Accompanied by composer Benji Bower’s atmospheric montage of just about every space tune ever written, the aliens suddenly start appearing here, there and everywhere in delightful puppet form, each one manipulated by Wurzinger himself, despite his insistence that they don’t really exist,

All this is great fun for the very young, helped along by Hayley Grindle’s Technicolor-bright designs and directed with the lightest of touches by Sally Cookson, who now offers a formidable portfolio of children’s theatre work in Bristol and Bath, and is also beginning to make her mark on a wider stage.