OSO Arts Centre, Barnes, London SW13 – until 22nd February 2020 VAULT Festival, Crescent, Leake Street, London SE1 – 6th–8th March
Reviewed by Antonia Hebbert
3***
In a dreamlike set with a big paper moon and stars, this show puts together the poetry of Roger McGough with the acrobatic skills of performers from Feathers of Daedalus circus troupe. While McGough’s poetry plays with words and follows curious threads of thought, the circus artists provide a physical counterpoint, rolling and flowing around the small performance space with handstands, puppetry, juggling and other turns that are beautiful to watch.
The poems span 30 years of McGough’s work, and follow a sequence through the day, from waking up and going to school, to night-time and dreams. There is a lot of charm here, and the playfulness of McGough’s poems should be well suited to the playfulness of circus skills. They both take you by surprise with counter-intuitive inventiveness.
The combination didn’t entirely work in the performance that I saw, which was geared to the very young (pre-school) children in the audience, while McGough’s poems seem to belong most to older children, of at least primary age. As he says himself, ‘When writing poems for children I have in mind the daydreamer, the one who is always staring out of the classroom window …’ It was very sweet and gentle, but the jokes and puns and word play didn’t always come across strongly, and the darker poems felt a little too dark for the tinies.
It will probably be very different with a more rambunctious school-age audience for the performers to play up to. Alongside the show, McGough and Feathers of Daedalus are also running children’s poetry workshops, which sound like fun. Joanna Vymeris directs.