Lilly Through The Dark (Tour -Burton Taylor, Studio, Oxford)

Lilly herself is a wide-eyed bean pole of a puppet, beautifully manipulated to convey the sense of loss she feels at the death of her father. As she travels through the underworld in search of him, she meets a host of strange and horrible creatures that force her to think on questions of memory, grief and love.
There are many moments of quiet beauty in the show. Lilly’s interactions with Joseph Bone’s Rottenpockets, the steward of the underworld, are particularly enjoyable for the contrast between the former’s delicate movements and the latter’s gruff physicality.

Equally impressive is the show’s design. Wisely favouring simplicity and imagination over big, didactic statements, wonder and storytelling are evoked using the tiniest of tools. A bulb in an actor’s hand becomes a dream, beads in a bag become lost stories and an umbrella mixed up with rags becomes a weeping-willow. The very fact that all the action takes place on a stack of books from which the cast emerge at the beginning is recognition that this is storytelling, myth and fairytale at its most charming and evocative.

The River People have cobbled together a consistent and unique way of spinning a yarn that allows them perfect freedom to let the tremendous sadness at the heart of this tale come out. This is a company to keep an eye on.

– Josh Tomalin