Pero

Puppet show is too small a phrase for this utterly enchanting children’s play from Speeltheater Holland, based in Edam. Hard cheese if you don’t catch it before 12 October; it’s sexy, beguiling, beautifully performed and designed, with wonderful music and is suitable – I’d like to say compulsory – for anyone over six years old.

Basing his text on a children’s book by the French philosopher Michel Tournier, author and composer Guus Ponsioen describes a poignant commedia dell’arte love triangle of a small town baker, Pero, his bashful Colombina and a cocky Italian house-painter, Palentino.

These three puppets are visibly manipulated by two actors, Inez de Bruijn and Timmy Velraeds, who play out their own romance. And a third layer of involvement is provided by Ponsoien and Annemarie Maas at two keyboards as the figures of the melancholic Moon and the operatic Sun, the one pining for other, the Sun asserting mythical and elemental superiority.

Pedro works by night, Colombina scrubs with the washerwomen by day. They occupy two adjacent mobile towers in outline with dolls’ house interiors, lit up rooms, small stairways. The stage erupts in joyous street song as Palentino arrives on his bike with pots of paint, daubs Colombina’s exterior and elopes with her to the countryside.

At this point a large scenic box unfolds to reveals green pastures, ducks on gloves in the river, tiny model sheep and cows. But snow falls on the domestic idyll as Palentino demands more and more pasta. Back in the town, Pero has closed the bakery and filled it with pastry Colombinas. The three strands of romantic impasse are resolved in a rhapsodic waltz.

I’m aware that much children’s theatre combines puppetry with actors, properties with scenic innovation, music with mime, in a whole new genre of theatrical presentation, but I’ve rarely seen anything as outstanding as this production by Speeltheater’s co-founder Onny Huisink. Pero is a perfect work of art on every level and the most delightful sixty minutes in town.

– Michael Coveney