The Polar Bears Go Wild
Eilidh MacAskill and Fiona Manson let their audience provide the vocabulary in this delightful new piece from Fish and Game, aimed at under-sixes. They play a pair of adventuring polar bears, traversing the spiky triangles of Claire Halleran’s simple blue and white set as if they were climbing the highest peek.
Having attained the heights and had a warming drink, they ski down to spend the rest of the suitably brief performance using toy versions of themselves to relate tales of travel - rowing across lakes, crossing icy mountains, which are made of foil survival blankets, and, finally, scaling a high peek. Which, besides looking exactly like a Christmas Tree, appears to be where they came in.
This is all inventive stuff, which prompts the audience’s imaginations to fill in the story and make the link between the performers and their toy selves. Greg Sinclair’s plinky-plonky music is neither intrusive nor stretching. The invitation to play with the tactile blankets at the end makes it all a little more real.
Perfect for three year-olds, the gentle storytelling needs a shade more substance to satisfy its older audiences. MacAskill and Manson make loveable characters, although there will always be a few bawling walkouts when human-sized bears are involved. But, really, this is another triumph for Fish and Game.
