Theatre reviews: Pirates Love Underpants | Hopeful Monsters

Hopeful Monsters, The Studio, Edinburgh ★★★

In the world of children’s theatre, there’s no asset more valuable than a good, simple story, vividly told; and NPL Productions’ touring stage version of the much-loved children’s book Pirates Love Underpants is a show (for children around four-eight) that absolutely rejoices in the sheer, brightly-coloured clarity of the tale it tells, and allows the audience to share all the fun.

Adapted by Brad Fitt from the book by Claire Freedman and Ben Cort, first seen at the Curve in Leicester last Christmas, and briefly at the Lyceum this weekend, Pirates Love Underpants tells the tale of Captain Eyepatch and the crew of the Black Bloomer as they set off from one south sea island to another – very small indeed – to find the glorious Pants Of Gold, whose location is marked on a worn and ancient treasure map.

On a jolly stage topped by rigging full of underpants drying in the wind, the Captain – played by designer Debbie Mingham’s terrific Eye-patch puppet – and his four-strong crew battle scary sea creatures in Big Knickers Bay, the tottering Long John Bridge over a gulf full of crocodiles, and a very scary dark cave, before reaching the golden underpants; and at every step, bums, bloomers and assorted undergarments feature cheekily enough to keep the young audience laughing, but always in a cheerily innocent style.

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In Curve associate Cara Nolan’s production, the colours are vivid, Jude Taylor’s original songs are rousing and highly singable, the captain’s puppet parrot is a star turn, and there’s the odd little moment of video – usually featuring a sea monster – to deliver extra thrills. And if a perfectionist might quibble with the staging of the plot’s climax – when the key action is hidden from the audience by a thick wall of stage grass – it hardly seems to matter; in a 50-minute show that, from its opening moments, draws the audience straight into the tale of confused Captain Eyepatch and his motley crew, and has us all roaring along with the show’s favourite catch-line – “Why are we pirates?” “Because we arrrrrr…”.

Over at The Studio in Potterrow, meanwhile, the Scottish-English-Hungarian puppetry group Hopeful Monster present their brief 40-minute show Hopeful Monsters, which tells a tale about the evolution of life on earth using nothing but music, lighting, a few tiny props, and their own bare hands and forearms. In a sense, this meditative show could scarcely be more different from Pirates Love Underpants; it has no words, no obvious story to tell, and only a gentle structural arc.

Yet the technique used by the show’s three performer-creators (Ella Mackay, Eti Leacock and Bori Mezo) to conjure up a couple of billion year’s-worth of living things, real and imaginary – fish and frogs, crabs and crawly things, snakes and birds and finally a few ruminant mammals – is so clever and absorbing in detail, and so subtly disturbing in its layers of meaning, that children in the over-7 age group suggested for the show remain absolutely absorbed throughout.

The music by Michael Hyland is subtle and magical, Topher Dagg’s beautiful pinpoint lighting is crucial to creating the visual effects and illusions on which the show depends. And if this brief reflection on our planet and its life forms barely seems complete, and retains the feel of a work in progress, there is still something deep and searching about the images it conjures; as if, in exploring how to use their own fingers, hands and arms to create all these all these strange, funny, endearing and deeply recognisable creatures, the Hopeful Monster theatre-makers are drawing attention to the deep communion between their human bodies, and the fundamental structures of life itself – a communion we must increasingly recognise, for our very survival.

​Pirates Love Underpants at the Whitehall Theatre, Dundee, 9 September, Aberdeen Arts Centre, 10 September, and on tour across the UK. Hopeful Monsters at Lyth Arts Centre, 20 September.

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