Tall Tales for Small People

Although billed as a children’s show, anyone who has had the good fortune to see Communicado perform before would recognize this as a vintage production.  From the varied and colourful set, consisting of a step-ladder and a versatile cart which becomes on demand a bed, a barn or a table, to the fiddle and drum music with its nostalgic East European flavour, to the magic tricks which captivate the eye, we are given a feast of a context for three tales told Scheherazade-like by the father of a Traveller family who have bargained for a night’s camp on an estate in return for entertaining the gamekeeper with stories.

The three stories are enacted by everyone on stage.  One story is about a Traveller girl who loses her family at the fair and how she is nearly captured by death’s messengers to be used for dissection. A splendidly macabre black coach and horses appear out of the dark.

While this story plays on the terrors of the night, another uses humour to depict the difficulties a young couple face with a constantly crying baby.  At birth the baby flies across the room and is gracefully caught.  It is the postman, babysitting, who notices that the gross fairy baby is a changeling.  He advises the couple to throw it over the waterfall – ‘Don’t try this at home’, the audience is warned.  The couple get their baby back but it cries just as much as the changeling.  A lesson there somewhere.

My favourite story was about an old ‘Dafty’ who fed the forest birds – these actors were wittily characteristic. The Dafty has fallen in love with the beautiful swan on the lake.  She moves about the stage, flexing her soft shiny wings in a dreamy dance.  As a child I would have been enraptured. The old man has pined away for love of the swan. The birds consult together: informed, the swan goes to the old man’s hut and changes him into a swan. They fly away together. In such scenes as these the music draws us magically into the required mood.

Full marks to the director Gerry Mulgrew and the Communicado team.  Here’s hoping this was the second of many National Theatre of Scotland collaborations to visit Arran.