Theatre review: The Christmas Quangle Wangle, North Edinburgh Arts
The Christmas Quangle Wangle
North Edinburgh Arts
Star rating: * * *
Now, the company are pausing for performances of The Christmas Quangle Wangle. It’s a charming, laid-back hour, which often has its tiny audience squealing in delight.
The show is based on the Edward Lear nonsense poem about the Quangle Wangle Quee, a solitary creature with a giant hat on which all the weird creatures of the Earth come to nest. What draws the children into the tale, though, is the presence of its two narrators, Stella and Stan, a pair of slightly strange, shy kids – beautifully played by Ashley Smith and Scott Fletcher – who bond into fast friends as they become drawn into Lear’s surreal, imagination-exploding world.
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Hide AdVirginia Radcliffe’s script and Jonny Austin’s production might work slightly better if there was more clarity and drive around the story of Stan and Stella, and less long-drawn-out detail in the Lear episodes. There are delightful songs by Radcliffe and Tim Brinkhurst, most of them a couple of verses too long. The chances for audience participation also need to be more clearly signalled.
It remains a gently seductive show, though; and the design features big pop-up storybooks so gorgeous that one little tot kept trying to climb inside the picture, as if he wanted to stay in the magical world of the story.