Edinburgh Children's Festival reviews: Toto Kerblammo! | Brrr | Gretel
Tim Crouch’s latest show for children is a near-perfect piece of theatre about loving and losing, writes Joyce McMillan
Brrr, Lyra Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★
Gretel, Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh ★★★
Tim Crouch is a star of the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe, and one of the great gurus of cutting edge theatre in the UK. He has also, though, written and created many shows for young people; and the latest, produced by Unicorn Theatre in 2024, is the wonderful Toto Kerblammo!, briefly at The Studio last week as part of the Edinburgh International Children’s Festival.
The show, aimed at 10-13 year olds, is a complex dreamscape of a play set mainly inside the mind of Effy, a troubled teenage girl who has reached a life-threatening crisis. Her dad is absent, her mother is struggling with serious mental illness, and poor Effy is sent to stay with an aunt and uncle in a block of flats that totally bans pets.
Effy, though, can’t be without her best friend, her dog Toto, so she smuggles him into her room, triggering a chain of events leading to a terrible accident that leaves her in a coma.
We therefore find ourselves, with Effy, in a strange soft world – captured in Lily Arnold’s white fluffy platform of a set, surrounded by darkness – where memories of these events come and go, and only Toto, brilliantly played by Oliver Baines as a completely doggy presence, is with her, gradually coaxing her back to life. And crucially, we experience the sounds of this world via headphones, and a beautifully shaped binaural soundscape by Helen Skiera which moves voices and sounds around us while we sit still, just as Effy remains motionless in hospital.
What emerges is a near-perfect 70-minute piece of theatre about loving and losing, and returning to life again despite the pain. And if the play’s ending is full of sadness, it also contains great joy and hope; all perfectly captured by a brave, brilliant and totally stroppy Lily Olufemi-Bywaters as Effy, with the recorded voice of Sinead Matthews, as her mum, reaching out to her through the dark.
Scottish-based theatre-maker Hayley Earlam’s Brrr – at Lyra Theatre for EICF – is set in a strikingly similar landscape to Toto Kerblammo!; a soft white world of its own, in this case shaped like an igloo, with lots of soft seating and ever-changing light shading from blue to pink and creamy white.
The 50-minute show is designed as an experience of sound, movement and texture for older children with profound learning disabilities.
It involves three performer-dancers moving gently around the space, encouraging the youngsters to interact with the objects in the space, and gradually leading them towards a finale involving showers of silvery snow.
Crucial to the show’s success of the show is Earlam’s gentle choreography, with its varying levels of intensity, and Ollie Hawker’s beautiful continuous score, soothing yet dynamic in its gradual dramatic development.
And it was truly moving to see a small group of profoundly autistic and neurodivergent 10-11 year olds respond to this experience; gradually becoming calmer and more open, and tuning their sounds to the rise and fall of the music, and the dance.
At Assembly Roxy, meanwhile, the hugely gifted clown, acrobat and rope artist Clara Storti, of the Italian company Quattrox4, appeared with her show Gretel, in which a female character is living happily in her little domestic space, with her two pets represented by feather dusters, when a huge series of explosions wrecks the place, forcing her to pack up and leave with her world on a little trolley.
It’s a poignant story, powerfully performed. To me, though, it seems as though Storti’s combination of eccentric physical satire against the absurdity of humanity, and serious concern with current crises of war and displacement, actually involves quite adult levels of complexity, not best aimed at young primary school audiences; in a brave story that nonetheless –like so much of the work shown at EICF – deserves both love and attention, in our troubled times.
Edinburgh International Children’s Festival 2026 now over. EICF will return to venues across Edinburgh in June 2027.
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