There May Be A Castle – Little Angel Theatre

Stacey Read and Gilbert Taylor in There May Be A Castle at the Little Angel Theatre, London. Picture: Ellie Kurttz Photography

There May Be A Castle continues at the Little Angel Theatre, London until 23 January 2021.

Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩

With its basis in a Piers Torday novel and music by Barb Jungr, this show for 7-11s and their families ought to work well. In the event it falls disappointingly short of the sum of its parts.

For a start it can’t make up its mind what it’s trying to be or do. There’s a lot of apparently light-hearted silliness, songs and a fart joke so gratuitous that even the children didn’t laugh at the performance I saw. Actually it’s about the death of a child and the mismatch is jarring.

It’s confusing too. For a long time I often didn’t know what was going on and I’m a theatrically experienced adult. Goodness knows what under-11s make of it if they haven’t read the book.

Three children (Georgia Mae-Myers, Stacey Read and Kat Johns-Burke) are being driven by their mother (Ruth Calkin) across the moors to spend Christmas with their Grandfather (Gilbert Taylor). Weather conditions are appalling –  driving snow and a windscreen quite cleverly projected onto the back wall. The car crash is foreseeable from the moment they get into the vehicle.

One of the children, Mouse (Stacey Read) disappears from the site of the accident and embarks on a brightly-lit quest for a castle – shades of Camelot as she’s dressed as a knight. She acquires companions: a dinosaur, a big version of her own toy horse and a minstrel who bear more than passing resemblance to her sisters and mother – a device borrowed from the Wizard of Oz film and hundreds of stage shows since.

Then she’s found – presumably unconscious although it’s not clear – and taken to hospital where tragedy takes over.

Of course Jungr’s songs are tuneful and effective with the backing nicely recorded by a small band. But Read doesn’t always sing in tune and her first song (which comes so far into the piece I was beginning to wonder why I was reviewing this show for a musical theatre title) was badly ill-tuned at the performance I saw.

There are, however, several songs which are well sung by all five actors. For example, ‘Just a Man’ and ‘Onward to Where’ are quite memorable with some attractive fugal work in the latter.

The cast teamwork is strong too, slickly making use of the whole Little Angel Theatre space with neat entrances from the back. And the moment of Mouse’s death with everyone else in shocked slow motion is very powerful. The cast are a talented bunch but, generally, this show does them no favours.

Moreover this is a play with songs which uses some puppetry rather than a puppetry piece and that seems rather a waste of Little Angel’s USP although the sheep puppet is so lovely that I wanted to take him home.

Goodness knows what children seeing this show will go away thinking. The life-after-death theology (if that’s what it is) is distinctly peculiar.

Susan Elkin