How curious to be a child trying to make sense of adult behaviour, with its rules, routines and unfathomable absence of fun. Several of the shows on the opening weekend of the Edinburgh international children’s festival take this idea as a starting point, turning their attention away from the lives of the target audience and towards the world of adult eccentricity.
This can be a risk. In the almost wordless 9 to 5, the Belgian company Nevski Prospekt fields four office workers wearing identical grey suits as they loop through the rituals of dull bureaucratic life. A young Edinburgh audience with no experience of crowded commuter trains or complex filing systems (aren’t offices paperless these days?) struggles to know what is going on.
What it does recognise, however, is the urge to break free of regulations. The more the patterns are repeated, the greater the need to disrupt them. Eventually, one of the Kafkaesque workers breaks rank. Having had his mind opened by an operatic aria, he introduces small variations to upset the working rhythm. It produces comic and then spectacular effects (paper everywhere), even if the “I Am What I Am” message about self-expression feels imposed.
Also concerned with the pull between the playful inner child and the serious grownup is I… er… Me, a technically astonishing collaboration between Het Houten Huis (Netherlands) and Nordland Visual Theater (Norway). Directed by Elien van den Hoek with the visual daring of Robert Lepage, it is staged on a rotating cube, designed by Douwe Hibma, on which actor Martin Franke plays a punctilious office worker going through the daily grind.
With each turn of the set, the location switches, the actor tumbling from kitchen to bathroom to office, as cupboards, tables and fish tanks ingeniously slide in and out of sight. Up becomes down and the line between reality and dream gets harder to distinguish. A hand slides in to ruffle his neatly arranged jacket, a fish swims across the room into his mouth, a phone call becomes an echoing conversation with himself. The more order he tries to impose on his working life, the more chaos his alter ego wreaks at home. It is a tremendous show.
The battle between order and chaos continues in Der Lauf, a gladiatorial riot of smashed crockery and broken glass by Le Cirque du Bout du Monde (France) and Vélocimanes Associés (Belgium). Inspired by French TV game show Intervilles, a variant on It’s a Knockout, it features two performers with buckets on their heads who must perform a series of balancing acts with spinning plates and towering wine glasses, cheered on by an anxious audience. It is daft, delirious, edge-of-your-seat stuff.
But it’s not all about those crazy grownups. There are also shows about children, such as the excellent Protest, seen previously at Newcastle’s Northern Stage, and the captivating Somewhere Else by Slovenia’s Ljubljana Puppet theatre. In direct storytelling style, actor Asja Kahrimanović Babnik gives a moving account of a child whose home comes under fire, forcing her family to flee. Magically, as she talks, the chalk lines on the school blackboard become animated, bringing wonder to her sad tale of survival.
• Edinburgh international children’s festival continues until 4 June
