Theatre review: The Last Polar Bears, Sorn, Ayrshire

SOMETIME today, in a small town in Ayrshire, several dozen children on bikes will ride out from the local primary school, to meet another group of cyclists coming into town. The new arrivals may be a little wet and windswept, after a journey of 20 miles or so.

On the trailers behind their bikes, though, they will be bringing everything they need for their next performance; because The Last Polar Bears – now on tour to schools from Galloway to Edinburgh – is the National Theatre of Scotland’s first-ever attempt at a carbon-light, environmentally friendly touring production, without so much as a van to transfer the set or the actors between venues. And because the medium is the message, the show is based on a children’s book written by the brilliant Scottish writer and political cartoonist Harry Horse, in which he expressed his concern over global warming, and the possible melting of the Arctic landscape in which polar bears thrive. So, in Joe Douglas’s adaptation – which he also directs – Tam Dean Burn plays grandpa, determined to travel to the North Pole to see polar bears in their natural home. With him goes his dog Roo, an uppity whippet with great confidence in her own superior abilities, played by Kirsten McLean; and in Arctic regions, they meet a whole range of other characters, all played with some flair by Joyce Falconer.

The show is charming but indecisive, and needs a more emphatic and shapely ending to seal its place in the minds and hearts of young audiences. Yet Harry Horse’s book provides a real prince among children’s theatre scripts, full of excellent jokes, and a fine streak of surrealism. And when this tour has had time to sharpen its bicycle-paced rhythm, it should offer this generation of schoolchildren a sweet, quirky and haunting reminder of our urgent need to find a different way of living, or watch our fellow creatures die.

Rating: ****