Theatre review: The Legend of Woesterdam

Published on Monday 16 May 2011 19:51

THE LEGEND OF WOESTERDAM CAMMO ESTATE, EDINBURGH ****

THE final weekend of the Bank of Scotland Imaginate Festival for children was a breathtakingly varied affair, with shows ranging from the new Scottish Starcatchers' production, First Light – for audiences under two – to Jamie Adkins's hilarious Canadian clown show, Circus Incognitus.

Out in the woods at the Cammo Estate, though, Studio Orka and Kopergietery of Belgium presented one of the sweetest and most inventive shows of the festival, in The Legend of Woesterdam, a ragingly eccentric romantic love story staged in a way that even eight-year-old boys cannot resist.

In a woodland clearing, we discover Elvira, the last survivor of a family who tried to save the legendary happy city of Woesterdam, which, she tells us, once stood on this very spot.

Woesterdam was such a lovely place that all the belly-butterflies in the world once hatched there, those fluttery butterflies in the stomach that people feel when they are very happy. But the city fell into the hands of a dictator; and it seems Elvira's great-grandpa tried to hide the last Woesterdam apple, with the last butterfly larva inside, in the very pond beside which we are standing. Cue the entrance of handsome park-keeper Patrick – already in love with Elvira – and a 75-minute riot of rickety Heath Robinson-style technology, of rambling back-stories told in the tented camp in the woods, and a rousing finale involving a canoe on the pond, a floating duck with a camera in its bottom, and a bit of an argument about the nature of love.

Elvira's repeated refusal to engage with Patrick finally gets on the nerves, and the end is marred by the absence of any sign of a revived butterfly. The whole show is adorable, though, ingenious, engaging and occasionally brave; and I'm certain none of the children who saw it will forget its message about cracking on with life anytime soon.