Reviews & features: Kids, Suzanne Black

The Girl With No Heart

Children's storybook on loss of innocence fails to come to life

The Girl with No Heart is based on a short story book written by performer Louisa Ashton. A children’s parable about the loss of innocence, Sparkle and Dark’s Travelling Players use puppetry, silhouettes and origami to narrate the tale of a girl who…

The White Dalmatian

Fairytale musical with a twist

Little Claire gets a special new stuffed toy for her birthday, Dalmatian Polkadot, but one of her old toys, Witch, is jealous. She magics Dalmatian’s spots to Fairyland and all the other toys have to journey there to retrieve them. In this musical…

The Railway Children

A classic revisited

Rather than cater to contemporary children’s experiences, Sell a Door Theatre Company has gone for a faithful rendition of a classic. E. Nesbit’s well-loved tale of Mrs Waterbury and her three children, who are forced to move to the country while her…

Jungle Book: The Next Chapter

Monkeying around with Kipling’s classic

Rudyard Kipling’s fables are part of the collective national psyche, so this follow-up from Glenn Elston and the Australian Shakespeare Company has a lot to live up to. The story picks up when Mowgli, now grown, returns to the jungle to visit Baloo.

Puppet show round-up from the Edinburgh Festival

Rounding up the best acts made of socks, sponges and foam

Puppetry acts are the black sheep of the performing arts family: indulged but not held in serious regard. Shitty Deal Puppet Theatre Company’s Oh! What a Shitty War (●●) recounts the history of warfare with hand puppets. Mistaking the charmingly…

Doctor Austin and Doug Safety's Time-Tastical Time Tale

It’s science Jim, but not as we know it

Time travel is a gift to fiction writers, but when it comes to the facts, even Doctor Who had to resort to describing it as ‘a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff’. Dr Austin and Doug Safety have set themselves a hard task. Starting with…

Lucy Hawking

What do you do when your father is one of the world’s most respected theoretical physicists, author of the bestseller A Brief History of Time and you want to be a writer? The answer was obvious to Lucy Hawking, daughter of Stephen: write a book…