A Birthday for Bear – Upstairs at the Gatehouse

A Birthday for Bear continues at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London until 9 June 2024.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

This decent little show for pre-schoolers, adapted from the book by Bonny Becker and directed by Jessica Elisa Boyd, has plenty of charm and it certainly held the attention of the children I saw it with.

The ‘plot’ gives us a big grumpy bear (Duane Gooden) who is obsessed with housework and loathes birthdays. Then along comes a cheerful, cheeky mouse (Katie Pritchard) who adopts disguises to persuade him to celebrate. Keyboard, sound effects and occasional incursions into the story are down to MD Hannah Barker. No prizes for guessing how it ends.

It’s reasonably entertaining but Eamonn O’Dwyer’s songs are unmemorable – and ‘Everybody Loves Birthdays’ put me in mind of a silly song I used to do in my 1960s gigging days called ‘Everybody Loves Saturday Night’ so it didn’t feel very original.

Gooden sings well, however, with a rich voice. He nails the exasperated irritation that his character feels too.

Pritchard brings plenty of personality to the mouse (who is also sometimes represented as a puppet but I’m not sure toddlers would recognise this as the same character). She is very good at audience engagement and the grown-up joke when, as a French postie, she launches into Edith Piaf is the best moment in the show.

Barker has lots of talent. Her turn as an accordion-playing garden gnome is fun and I wonder how long she had to practise making the sound of a window-cleaning rubber blade on glass?

Lauren Jones’ set makes imaginative use of the long-playing space at Upstairs at the Gatehouse with a reversible front door and window at its centre.

A  gently pleasing, if unremarkable, show.

Susan Elkin