Children’s puppet show The Elves & The Shoemaker part of an Oxford University research project on kids literacy
The Elves & The Shoemaker
at the Pegasus Theatre, Oxford
until December 24
Review by JON LEWIS
Best Feet Forward
Wild Boor Ideas, Emma Boor’s puppet theatre that specialises in theatre for young children, has been commissioned for three years to produce Christmas shows at the Pegasus Theatre. The first of these shows, The Elves & The Shoemaker, is also part of an Oxford University research project funded by TORCH to find out whether Boor’s illustrated book that accompanies the play, available to buy on Amazon, is encouraging kids to read at a time when literacy rates are falling.
The hour-long production is directed by Euton Daley in the theatre where he was once a long-serving, and inspiring, artistic director. The setting is a rickety shoe shop (designer, Nomi Everall) owned by Mrs Shoemaker (Amantha Edmead), a business that she is running into the ground because she thinks her shoes are charity donations rather than items on a profit and loss account. Her clever dog Boots (Ezra Dobson) has a business brain, creating workable financial plans for his owner to follow, only for her to crumple up his work into balls of paper for him to fetch. She (unlike the audience) does not speak ‘dog’ so poor Boots spends most of his time frustrated that he cannot help more.
From the get-go the production hooks the audience in the packed theatre with its catchy 50s-style do-wop songs featuring puns on the word ‘shoe’ (composer, Greg Hooper). The lyrics are easy to sing along to, and everyone remembers the lines when the numbers are repeated later.
As often happens in fairytales, things happen in threes. Three customers in turn request new shoes, reducing Mrs Shoemaker’s diminishing supply of leather to nothing. The three characters, the Gingerbread Man (Krage Brown), the largest Billy Goat Gruff (Emma Boor, getting laughs out of every line) and the Fairy Godmother (Brown, doubling hilariously) are represented with some delightful puppets of which the Billy Goat is a marvel with hits brush tail, bag made out of a large bag, and legs made from hammers.
Boor and Brown also play the cobbler elves, Bing Bong and Ding Dong, represented by more traditional, humanoid puppets.
Strongly recommended.
