The Little Prince

The Little Prince
Spare Parts Puppet Theatre / Monkey Baa Theatre Company. Lendlease Darling Quarter Theatre. July 5 – 9, 2016

Monkey Baa once again is providing theatrical treats for the school holidays. This week it’s Spare Parts Puppet Theatre’s production of The Little Prince. Next week it’s Random Musical.

Based on the much-loved book by writer and pioneer aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince has beenadapted for the puppet stage by Simon Clarke. In this gentle story about caring and friendship, Shane Adamczak and Jessica Lewis take the puppet Prince from his home planet and his beautiful rose to meet a king in his realm, a geographer who hasn’t travelled, and, in the Sahara desert, a snake who offers to help him and a fox who learns to trust his friendship.

The puppets, made by Jiri Zmitko are delicately carved and cleverly manipulated. So too is  Zmitko’s set. Inside a wooden case, cleverly attached to a pallet for easy touring, a collection of boxes transform into a throne and a desk, while the case itself eventually becomes the desert and a nifty plane.

As well as manipulating the snake and the fox, Adamczak takes on the roles of the king, the geographer and a lost pilot, while Lewis flies the Prince through the night sky to his imaginative destinations. Both performers engage the imagination of the young audience with gentle humour and endearing characterisations that are true to de Saint-Exupery’s original creations.

Lighting (Karen Cook) and music (Lee Buddle) make the journey more imaginative and mysterious, however the many breaks to re-set boxes for each new scene unfortunately disrupt the continuity of the performance and require Lewis to take her Little Prince out of sight and herself out of character. It’s a matter of cost obviously, and that’s completely understandable, but a stage hand to help Lehrer with the scene changes could avoid this and make the performance just a little smoother.

Nevertheless, this is a delightful and cleverly contrived re-telling of a story that has charmed readers across the world since it was first published in 1943. Important too that young people are given the opportunity to see something gentle and imaginative to juxtapose the world of their computer games and movies.

Carol Wimmer

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