Theatre reviews: Tongue Twister | Grown Ups | Shades of Shadows | Saria Callas

This year’s Edinburgh International Children’s Festival is big on laughs, writes Joyce McMillan

Tongue Twister, North Edinburgh Arts Centre ★★★★

Grown Ups, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★

Shades of Shadows, The Studio, Edinburgh ★★★★

Saria Callas, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★

It’s Children’s Festival time; and at the sparkling new North Edinburgh Arts Centre, one of Scotland’s leading makers of theatre for children, Greg Sinclair, is rolling out his latest show Tongue Twister.

It’s a remarkable show at many levels, both because it uses and reflects on language in ways that international theatre for children often tends to avoid, and because of the lavish, surreal energy of its visual and physical response to that verbal content.

Tongue Twister | Imaginate

Sinclair begins by telling us that he has been fascinated by tongue twisters ever since since his grandad taught him to say “She sells sea shells on the sea shore"; and on designer Rachel O’Neill’s luminous stage - backed by two huge sun-like circles in which words occasionally appear - he runs through a series of wild and hilarious visual variations on the theme, rolling around the stage in great frothy layers of sea-blue and white fabric.

He goes on to to introduce tongue twisters in a dozen different languages, from Japanese and Setswana to Gaelic, riffing merrily, for example, on images suggested by the French tongue-twister “dans ta tente ta tante t’attend”.

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In the end, what Sinclair and his team create is a glorious 50 minute tribute to that wonderful, universal, playful moment when human beings pause in the grown-up business of dealing with the content of language, and begin to amuse themselves by toying with the forms of it. And Tongue Twister not only celebrates that moment, but explodes it into whole episodes of visual and verbal silliness, as wild and surreal as they are funny, and joyfully human.

Grown Ups | Imaginate

If Greg Sinclair is a children’s theatre maker who works by effectively becoming a child for the length of the show, I was also struck by two EICF shows, this week, which invited children to laugh (which they did, most heartily) at the sight of adults making a complete hash of being grown up.

Grown Ups, by the Compagnie Barbarie and Bronks of Belgium, is a slightly overlong but brilliantly staged piece pf slapstick about a team of four grown women failing to cope with a series of mysterious water leaks onto the stage. Shades of Shadows at The Studio, meanwhile - by Tangram Collective of France and Germany - is an exceptionally beautiful and clever shadow-play piece about two women trying to sit down for a cup of tea together, that had the children in the audience chortling with pleasure, for a blissful 45 minutes.

Shades of Shadows | Florian Feisel

And out beyond the children’s festival, this week’s Play, Pie and Pint drama came as a harsh reminder of how repressive societies can simply forbid essential forms of play and creativity, including those as basic as singing and dancing. In Sara Amini’s powerful but awkwardly structured monologue, Saria Callas, she plays an Iranian woman brought up under the repressive rules of the Islamic Republic, yet as rebellious as any teenage girl, and desperate to become a singer.

As an adult, and a single mother in London, she finds that her beloved son has inherited her love of performance, and - like her - wants the freedom to express himself as he is, whatever the cost. And although Saria’s story takes a while to reach this crisis-point, there’s no doubting the tremendous strength and charisma of Amini’s performance, as a woman not only inspired by the greatest singers of both Iranian and European culture, but fully capable of making the same kind of impact on an audience, given half a chance.

Tongue Twister is at North Edinburgh Arts Centre until 31 May; also at the Beacon Arts Centre Greenock, 3 June, and the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 6-7 June. Saria Callas is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 31 May. The Edinburgh International Children’s Festival continues at venues across Edinburgh until 1 June, see www.imaginate.org.uk/festival/

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