Many young families quickly find themselves running out of room. Perhaps that’s one more reason why Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s lively 1993 picture book A Squash and a Squeeze – their first collaboration – remains so well loved. The woes of a little old lady whose house feels too small began as a song Donaldson wrote for television, resulting in the catchy rhythms and rhymes in the book. Now the story has been adapted by Barb Jungr and Samantha Lane, with music and lyrics by Jungr, in a jolly if overstretched hour for children aged three to eight.
Lane’s production opens with a wise old man squeezing his way through a squash of young theatregoers to arrive at the lady’s doorstep. Kate Bunce’s set design directly reflects Scheffler’s illustrations and finds a smart solution to presenting a claustrophobic abode on a not particularly titchy stage. What at first looks like a wendy house intermittently spins around, its roof splitting to reveal a three-walled interior. With each farmyard animal that the lady is encouraged to bring in as part of the man’s canny scheme, the house closes up again and mayhem is heard within.
The only downside to that strategy is that we have less time to admire the wonderful puppets designed and made by Maia Kirkman-Richards. There’s a Tabby McTat-esque moggy as well as a handheld hen (eyes as startled as Scheffler’s animals), a goat that is part wheelbarrow, a pig with a barrel for a body and, most ingeniously, a cow constructed with a yoke holding two pails (one including udders). Each creature gets a song and a routine to entice them indoors, with Jungr employing a variety of musical genres including cha-cha-cha, country and disco.
Jungr and Lane’s dialogue is merged with the narrator’s voice from the original, not always smoothly, and the new material is often in a minor key compared with Donaldson’s vibrant verse. But the man is winningly presented as a “purveyor of easy-peasy solutions” and the goat wittily puts a “baa” into his bad reputation. A trio of actor-puppeteers, Ruth Calkin, Mark Esaias and Gilbert Taylor, excel in comical expressions and the animals are brought to life with attention to the subtlest movements such as a ruffle of feathers or a cat’s wiggle before leaping.
You’d expect the show to milk more from the cow’s tabletop jig and the comedy could be more anarchic. But it’s hard to grumble and grouse when this menagerie are at their most madcap.
• At Little Angel Studios, London, from 8 March to 27 April. Then at the Lowry, Salford, 5-24 August.
