Theatre preview: The Last Polar Bear

CHILDREN’S show The Last Polar Bears has a hard-hitting message about climate change – and the cast are helping get it across by cycling for 300 miles to perform it.

The air in the village hall in Sorn, East Ayrshire, tingles with the kind of anticipation you only get from children, seated cross-legged in rows, in front of a makeshift stage. Forty-one pupils, the entirety of the local primary school, are here for the premiere of The Last Polar Bears, the first National Theatre of Scotland production made exclusively for schools.

The show is an “environmental adventure” adapted from the best-selling book by artist, musician and political cartoonist Harry Horse, who died in 2007. It is also the beginning of a very unusual kind of tour. The director and three actors will cycle between each of the 16 venues, a 300-mile round trip carrying their own gear plus all the costumes, set and props.

In the space of an hour, Sorn village hall is transformed. A colourful backcloth, suspended between two giant golf clubs, each held in place by a pair of bicycles, marks out the performance area. A world of ice sculptures, snow storms and igloos is created from lightweight, portable and frequently recycled objects. A cycling helmet with ears becomes a wolf costume, balled up pairs of socks are used as snowballs.

This is world of the Arctic, where Grandfather (Tam Dean Burn) travels, with his faithful if opinionated dog, Roo (Kirstin McLean) in his quest to see the last polar bears, before the ice melts. The characters they meet – from loutish wolves to a crazed American ice sculptor – are played by River City’s Joyce Falconer. It’s a poignant, funny, surreal fable which wears its green credentials lightly.

“Whenever I’ve been to see plays that have a message, that try to get science within the drama, I find it clumsy and a bit forced,” says director Joe Douglas, who wrote the adaptation. “I loved the way this book did it in a very subtle way. But a lot of Harry’s art came out of righteous indignation, and you get that sense through this too.”

Kay O’Hanlon, Harry’s older sister, who travelled from New York State with her eight-year-old daughter to attend the premiere in Sorn, was delighted with the result. “I tried to imagine what it was going to be like, and it was so much more than I imagined. The message came across really clearly and I think the children loved it. It’s exactly what Harry would have wanted. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

The team, who run workshops after each performance, have found their young audiences well informed about climate change. “I asked a wee boy today, ‘Why do you think we’ve got bikes with us?’” says Kirstin McLean. “And this child said: ‘You’ve got bikes instead of cars because cars create pollution, and because of the pollution the world heats up, and the ice caps melt and the polar bears die.

“The children know this theory and they understand it, but this show is different because they can see it in practice. They see the bikes come into the school, they see what the set has come out of, what it goes into, and they see us cycling off at the end.”

Douglas started thinking about the concept of environmentally friendly touring when on the road with Our Teacher’s A Troll, which he directed for NTS, in 2009. “There was a lot in the news about climate change and I started thinking a lot about it. I was sitting looking at our big lorry, which was parked outside Mull Little Theatre, overshadowing it, and thinking: ‘Maybe there’s a different way to do this’.”

But he admits he had no idea whether his idea would work. All the more so given that none of the team is an experienced cyclist, although they are joined on the road by Colin Clark from the NTS communications department, who is. The bicycles, custom-built from reclaimed materials at The Bike Station in Glasgow, are sponsored by Mackies Ice Cream, itself a carbon-neutral company. “It seemed important not to just pick actors who were superfit,” Douglas says. “It’s about what ordinary people can do.”

Dean Burn, whose one-man show Year of the Horse celebrated Harry Horse’s political cartoons, jumped at the chance to join the cast – but admits he was no cyclist. “It was really important to me to do this, but I knew it was going to be an enormous challenge. I had used Boris bikes when I was working at the National Theatre in London last summer, but apart from the time I decided I was going to run away when I was 16 and borrowed a friend’s bike, that was the sum of my cycling experience.”

Rehearsals for The Last Polar Bears were accompanied by a training regime of spin classes, circuit training, yoga and pilates. “At the end of first week’s rehearsals, we cycled to Eaglesham,” Dean Burn says. “Setting off, I still felt quite daunted, quite nervous, but when I came back I really felt: ‘I am a cyclist, I understand this’. It is tough, but you can still enjoy the toughness.”

There were more challenges to come: a baptism of fire, cycling the 27 miles from Glasgow to Kilmarnock in the pouring rain, and the graft of pushing the bikes up Sorn hill on a rare afternoon of sunshine. The entire team, however, seem undaunted, optimistic, and converts to cycling.

“I think I would say it’s changed my life,” says Joyce Falconer. “When you learn to drive, you become incredibly lazy. One of the reasons I took this job was to challenge myself to get fit. The first time I went up a hill I thought I was going to collapse, but it’s amazing how quickly your fitness levels change. I’ve got the bug, now I’m thinking about going on a cycling holiday.”

Kirstin McLean agrees. She enjoyed the challenge of fitting all her possessions into a single customised saddle-bag. “We had to be extremely ruthless, but actually, it makes life so much simpler. And you have a real relationship with the work that you’re making, you can feel the weight of what you’re carrying, you can see the landscape that you’re travelling through, and be aware of every mile that you cover.”

The cast have also learned bicycle maintenance. “I admit I’ll put my hand up and say: ‘Colin, can you fix this?’ but I think it’s very important for us to learn what he does,” says McLean. “What’s the point of having a bike if you can’t fix it yourself? It’s like Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, but with pushbikes.”

An hour after the audience leave, the village hall at Sorn is empty again. Every last vestige of The Last Polar Bears has been packed up, folded and fitted into custom-made bags (made from recycled NTS banners). We watch the five cyclists heading off into the rain on the most unusual theatre tour Scotland has seen for a long time.

• The Last Polar Bears tours primary schools until 1 June. www.nationaltheatrescotland.com