Edinburgh Fringe shows taking kids to the moon and back...from safe distance

IT’S the Edinburgh Fringe, dear reader, but not as we know it. The return of live, in-person productions to the biggest arts programme in the world comes with many Covid-enforced compromises.

There’s the mask-wearing, hand-sanitising and physical distancing, of course. More than that, however, there is the temporary loss of some long-established venues.

Take Will Pickvance’s delightful children’s show First Piano On The Moon (Pleasance at EICC, until August 15) for instance. As part of the Pleasance programme, it would usually play in one of the theatre spaces around the famous Pleasance Courtyard or in the student union at Edinburgh University.

This year, however, with so few in-person shows to offer, Pleasance has simply rented a few spaces in the well-appointed but decidedly anodyne Edinburgh International Conference Centre. Consequently, Pickvance’s lovely piece (which is recommended for children aged five and over) is being presented down in the bowels of the EICC, in the cavernous Cromdale Theatre.

The venue may be to theatrical atmosphere what Priti Patel is to asylum rights, but Pickvance, somehow, manages to pull it off. His show, which had an unusually successful online outing in the spring, is a fabulously inventive piece of musical theatre that engages children on an array of levels.

Playing on a bare stage, with only a piano and projector screen for company, Pickvance tells us the tale of his schoolboy self and a great, Austrian adventure. Young William was, entirely believably, a daydreamer.

A constant worry to his parents, he trudged forlornly home one fateful day, a letter to his folks ticking in his satchel like a time bomb. As we all know, official letters from school can only mean a “special kind of trouble”.

This letter was different, however. Will’s teachers may have despaired of his inattention and his flights of fancy, but they knew that he was the best musician in the entire school.

So, when the school was invited to send a pupil to perform at a special concert in Salzburg to celebrate Mozart’s birthday, it was a no-brainer. Hence, young William Pickvance found himself taken off to Austria, which is, he discovered, “further than Tesco”, but closer than the moon.

We learn all this by way of a combination of Pickvance’s wonderfully engaging storytelling, lovely piano playing and some delightful little video animations. As he unfolds his tale, the performer exudes, by turns, enthusiasm, excitement and trepidation in a way that transports children and adults alike.

There’s the wild-eyed wonder at being taken into the Mozart Geburtshaus (the museum to the composer, where young Will is to play in the concert). Then there’s the panic, upon meeting two of the other young musicians, in realising that, unlike his new, somewhat precocious friends, he has no great, classical piano piece to play to the audience tomorrow morning.

All of which, given young Will’s imaginative bent, leads to a long, late-night conversation with the ghost of Mozart himself. The spirit of Wolfgang Amadeus is, as you might expect, sympathetic and encouraging. The great composer is particularly excited to learn that his music has remained so popular over the centuries that it has even been played on the moon.

Swallow The Sea’s caravan is the colourful venue for a puppet performance

This storytelling is interspersed with high-energy piano playing, ranging from crowd-pleasing tricks (including playing upside-down) to a virtuosic medley (which goes from blues and jazz to tango and rock ‘n’ roll). It’s all very humorous, educational and highly entertaining stuff, as the little girl who shouted “Bravo! Bravo!” after every piano piece on Friday afternoon can attest.

Like all of the best children’s theatre-makers, Pickvance doesn’t patronise his young audience. He connects his childhood memories with their life experiences as a benign adult talking to a child, without recourse to any of the toe-curling mimicking of children that we still see in our culture.

Indeed, Pickvance is quite willing to stretch the vocabulary of his youngest audience members. His school report card, for example, is “incriminating evidence”.

This year’s Fringe is sadly, if inevitably, dominated by online shows. However, this brilliant piece, returning to its in-person roots following a pandemic-related sojourn into digital presentation, is a beacon for the return to live children’s theatre.

MEANWHILE, over on the south-east of the city centre, the intriguingly titled Swallow The Sea Caravan Theatre (Summerhall, until August 28) was promising to be “absurd… moving, magical [and] funny”. As if that wasn’t inducement enough, the show, by the Swallow The Sea performance company, involves puppet and object theatre which is presented from inside a very charming caravan theatre.

This kind of production is revered in many countries around the world, not least the Czech Republic and Quebec, where I have had the good fortune to be invited to puppet festivals and showcases in recent years. Its relative absence in Scotland (great theatre-makers and puppet-makers such as Shona Reppe and Gavin Glover notwithstanding) is a cause for some regret.

Without question, the show (staged by the young trio of Jemima Thewes, Emma Brierley and Jessica Raine as part of the Made In Scotland showcase) has the vision and the chutzpah needed to pioneer such work in Scotland. For a start, the piece has a running time of a mere 20 minutes, which, in itself, takes a bit of bottle.

In that third-of-an-hour, we are offered a defiantly analogue piece, in which seemingly planetary spheres fly around the caravan theatre on wires. After a short time, three friendly – but otherworldly – human characters intercede in this apparent movement of stars.

Between scenes, a black curtain rotates across the front of the miniature theatre, showing images of mushrooms and other fungi. In addition, the performers emerge, performing a kind of under-developed, old-fashioned mime that would, one suspects, illicit protests from the ghost of Marcel Marceau.

One approaches a short theatre piece such as this in the hope that it will be a victory of quality over quantity.

Swallow the Sea’s ambition is admirable, but, sadly, this frustratingly undercooked piece leaves one’s artistic appetite far from satiated.