Suppose you put on a play and no one turned up. Or the audience came but you just couldn’t see them. Those are the intriguing scenarios blurred in an irresistible, higgledy-piggledy show by crafty Dutch company Theater Artemis that has its young audience (ages 5-11) asking endless questions.
My nine-year-old, Hilda, has a few of her own as we arrive. For starters: who is the man, with ponytail, sparkly leggings and a light strapped to his forehead, roaming the auditorium lost in his thoughts? The first surprise, breezily explained by an usher, is that he is unaware of us. “We’re invisible and silent to him,” Hilda whispers.
It gradually becomes apparent that the solemn yet spangly chap (René Groothof) is the techie for a pair of clowns (Kim Karssen and Marijn Brussaard) who have come to London from the Netherlands to put on a performance. But can they really do so without an audience? It’s a playful spin on a familiar formula for children’s theatre: actors unable to see what’s right in front of their eyes. The hour unfolds like an extended skit on the old “it’s behind you!” line from panto.
Then there’s the invisible man himself who is Hilda’s favourite bit of the show and has a remarkably fleshed out personality and delightfully dry sense of humour in Brussaard’s voiceover. He arrives by spotlight and takes his place at the piano. Kids may be used to seeing a self-playing piano but there are some delightful touches in this symphony of invisibility: Hilda giggles as a cushioned seat somehow compresses under his weight and the instrument’s lid is lifted. Soon we are conspiring with him to further sabotage what he assures us will be an awful clown show. He gets one child to fetch him an imaginary packet of crisps and instructs a gaggle of helpers to wheel on a TV screen so we can watch a movie instead.
I’ve never seen so many hands go up in the audience when they ask for a volunteer, though Hilda sits firmly on her own, wary of what might happen next. That’s because Jetse Batelaan’s multi-layered production, jauntily scored by Keimpe de Jong, consistently upends expectations. This ingenious show follows its own kind of curious logic and it’s fun to keep up with as you question what you’re seeing.
“It’s like lots of little shows, not one big one,” says Hilda who loves the clever shadow play and the digital trickery which makes characters – and even the audience – appear and disappear on the TV screen. The illusions are done at just the right level for older children to enjoy working them out for themselves. Kids will want to see it again because, as we leave, the loudest among all the audience’s questions is simply “how did they do that?”
At the Unicorn theatre, London, until 18 June
