Once upon a time? What a tedious way to begin a story say the cast of this irresistible new show by Kneehigh founder Mike Shepherd, his first since the mighty Cornish theatre company disbanded last summer. Before it even kicks off, Calvino Nights has pyrotechnics and flag waving, music and dancing, with actors prowling through the crowd trying to swindle us. They are latterday versions of Crack, Crook and Hook, the crafty trio whose deceptions are recounted in the Italo Calvino collection of Italian folk tales that inspired the evening. “We’re robbers, we’re rogues, we’re thieves,” they chant roisterously. To make it clear: “We nick stuff!”
In Shepherd’s show – co-directed with Elayce Ismail and co-written with Carl Grose, Anna Maria Murphy and Tim Dalling – it is as if the stories slowly bloom up among the cast, much like the set seems to have grown from the ground. Ladders are entwined with branches in a pyre designed by Luke Wood and decorated with weathered instruments and sculptures of animal heads. Inside it, a live band make merry. Any show staged at the open air, clifftop Minack has instant atmosphere – the backdrop is the Atlantic Ocean – but Calvino Nights fully utilises the setting. It’s theatre that sharpens the senses.
You might expect one of the sea stories collected by Calvino to be prominent in the patchwork of the script but other elements dominate. The show’s fire master, Paka, wields burning instruments, orchestrates bursts of flames as a musical accompaniment and at one point sets the stage alight, underscoring Caitlin Kaur’s darkly wistful singing.
Kaur plays The Wife Who Lived on Wind, whose habit of eating air appeals to a skinflint tycoon (Dalling in fine comic form). Calvino’s miser was a prince in Messina; here he becomes a preening gazillionaire with an Elon Musk-esque obsession with Mars. The story is combined with that of the mean soup-seller Mama Cook (the brilliant Bea Holland) who has a chickpea-sized son, leading to a rather protracted escapade about a rocket heist, but neatly making the point that miserliness and exploitation are not the preserve of the megarich.
The show, like the folk tales collected by Calvino, also springs from a very real awareness of poverty. Mama Cook’s refusal to provide succour to a band of travellers gains pertinence from the way they emerge as if migrants from the ocean. Among the cast is Girum Bekele, a talented Ethiopian puppeteer and circus performer who joined the Good Chance ensemble and appeared in The Jungle, about the Calais refugee camp.
This compassionate show wears its heart on its sleeve (and on Shepherd’s own chest: he sports a “make love not war” T-shirt). It also has a sharp sense of political outrage. The characters are on a search for their moral compasses – and they’re not alone, Shepherd observes.
The morals of these stories could afford to be more understated but the stagecraft is often arresting. String and rod puppetry enriches the characters of Pete, Mama Cook and Calvino himself (also portrayed by Shepherd) and a huge puppet emerges at the climax, with wings made from twisted roots, her reproachful stare softening with a slight turn of the head. Lucy Seaber and Ruth Shepherd’s costumes include mix ’n’ match tracksuit tops and black kilts, which let the performers’ scratches and tattoos become part of the show’s aesthetic. The band, led by musical director Alex Lupo, strike up with the force of a crashing wave, and everyone on stage – including puppeteer Sarah Wright – is juggling a number of roles, if not flaming skittles as well.
Presented by the Minack and imPossible Producing, it is a bounteous night that deserves a longer life. Calvino would surely have approved: his collection was inspired by the Tuscan proverb “The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it.” This is nothing if not beautiful.
• Calvino Nights is at the Minack theatre until 19 May. Then at the Lost Gardens of Heligan, from 27-29 May.
