Tales from the River Thames

Tales from the River Thames is a collaboration
between the Unicorn Theatre, a theatre for young people located in South
London, and New International Encounter (NIE). They started off with
600 stories from school children based on the River Thames, and wove
them together into a tale of the river, ocean, pirates and mermaids.

The
play is successful for the most part. Set in the tunnels under London
Bridge, the interactive performance leads children from set to set
through a lock keeper’s cottage to an old style tavern and onto a beach.
This ensures that they are enthralled throughout and it’s a very clever
use of what appears to be an unusable space.
The acting all through
the play is the right side of melodramatic to make it into a sort of
pantomime that keeps young audiences interested. The facial expressions
and physical comedy of the actors bring these characters from
children’s imaginations to life. Because the stories were written by
school aged children, the tales are quite simple but yet very
entertaining.

Towards the end of the play
everything begins to fall apart though. Whilst it’s a patchwork of
different stories, they seem to fit together into a coherent tale of a
young boy lost at sea who becomes a pirate and then goes on a quest to
find out where he came from. Then, inexplicably, the audience is divided
into groups and sent off for a little story that has nothing to do with
anything that has come before. Whilst I appreciate the need to
incorporate as many of the children’s tales into the narrative as
possible, it jars with the flow of the story and interrupts the magic
and imagination that had been building in the young audience. It also
makes the play too long (one hour and ten minutes) for children, especially
considering that there is no interval.

On
the whole, this is a truly interactive piece of theatre. It creates an
opportunity for children to experience what is possible, both through
their own imaginative storytelling that contributes to the play, and by
taking them out of a conventional theatre. Tales from the
River Thames illustrates how you can completely suspend your
disbelief and become involved in a story in a different
environment.