For a drizzly Sunday morning, parents in middle class Highgate could have done a lot worse than take their young charges to see this charming Japanese double act present a beguiling mixture of eastern storytelling and origami.
Devised by the four-year-old production company A Thousand Cranes, it’s a delicately nuanced show in which a Japanese fairy tale about the rabbit in the moon who plays a game of hide and seek and seems to disappear. The journey to find him takes in a rather imaginative and inventive staging of rabbit footprints, a butterfly made out of newspaper and an elephant whose head is fashioned from Jiffy Bags. The story is also told using hand drawn storyboards, these are kept inside a box perched on the back of a push bike.
Yes, you don’t exactly smell the money here and these aren’t high-end production values on display (in fact everything on stage is apparently designed to fit into the back of Kumiko Mendl’s car). But it is evocative and Julian Butler’s unobtrusive music and sound effects add to the atmosphere and charm of this production.
There is also a heavy workshop element to proceedings with an appropriately (some may say typically) worthy environmental twist. At the end the children are invited to make recycled papier mache and decorate it in the manner of the story The rabbit was seen in the performance making a card for the moon goddess’ birthday.
My normally fidgety two-year-old girl seemed captivated throughout the show and enjoyed the papermaking too. To keep this audience mesmerised is high testament to the talents of these performers.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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