Pinocchio - The Pantomime

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Pinocchio begins with a woodcarver who makes a puppet and wakes to find it walking, lying and already halfway out of the door. What follows is less a lesson about honesty than a story about a child who keeps choosing the wrong thing and a father who keeps going after him anyway. The puppet is easily distracted and badly advised. A fox and a cat spot an easy mark. A fairground promises a better life than school. There is an island where nobody has to do anything they do not want to, which turns out to be exactly as sinister as it sounds. By the time he understands what he has done, his father has gone looking for him and is in considerably more danger than he is. It is adapted from Carlo Collodi's novel, published in 1883, which is a great deal darker and stranger than most retellings let on - full of hangings, transformations and threats that are never quite softened. This stage version is a musical built around puppetry, and it returned after a well-received first run. The puppetry is the production's central idea rather than decoration: the boy is visibly made, handled and animated by people in full view, so the question of what it takes to become real is being staged literally, in front of the audience, minute by minute. It works for families with children old enough for a few genuinely frightening passages, and for adults who know the story only through gentler versions. Live, the puppets are the reason to go - you can see exactly how they work, and it makes no difference at all.