Edinburgh international children's festival review – naughty shadows, silly grown-ups and tongue twisters

The Guardian

27-05-2025

If you think Peter Pan had problems with his shadow, you should see what Tangram Kollektiv have to contend with. In the German-French company's clever and understated Shades of Shadows, performers Sarah Chaudon and Clara Palau y Herrero find themselves in a landscape where shadows refuse to behave.
Staged in the Festival theatre studio, it starts out looking like a standard-issue piece of shadow puppetry as the two performers project the silhouette of a Dr Seuss-like city on to a screen. They focus in on a room in one of the buildings where a couple drink at a table, lit by an Anglepoise lamp. Mimicking this image, carefully positioning themselves around the table, mugs in hand, they upturn the normal order of things: the shadow comes first, real life second.
From there, matters grow increasingly surreal. A sinewy black puppet emerges from a lightbulb, the mugs float into the air, a spoon morphs into a fish and again into an aeroplane, blobs of light swell, contract and ricochet across the screens. In a spectacular piece of choreography, Chaudon appears in triplicate and gives each of her three shadows its own distinct gestures.
The delightfully inventive show, co-created with director Tobias Tönjes, is not the only piece of surrealism in the opening weekend of the Edinburgh international children's festival, the annual benchmark of quality theatre for young audiences. The wonderfully funny Grown Ups by Compagnie Barbarie, resident at Brussels' Bronks theatre, begins on an empty Traverse stage where an assortment of random objects – a roll of tape, an unfurling cable, an arrow – cross in front of us to a soundtrack of tuneless whistling.
Absorbed in an adult world of manual labour, Sarah Vangeel, Liesje De Backer, Amber Goethals and Lotte Vaes gradually appear, preoccupied by their mysterious tasks. They take a reckless approach to health and safety, wielding electric blades, scaling ladders and immersing live wires in water, but just as often busy themselves carrying large objects nowhere in particular.
As water starts trickling perilously from the ceiling, Karolien De Bleser's beautifully timed production takes a turn. Suddenly, this backstage crew notice the audience and realise they should be performing something called theatre. Their wayward attempts at Chekhov, ancient Greek ritual and classical dance are not just comically eccentric, they raise a fascinating conceptual question: if this is what counts as theatre in the adult world, what are we watching the rest of the time?
Still more everyday surrealism in Tongue Twister at North Edinburgh arts centre in which performer Greg Sinclair gets his mouth around the trickiest phrases from a dozen languages. Co-directed by Lu Kemp and Hannah Venet, the show keeps a stately pace, giving as much weight to the sensory pleasures of music, movement and design as to the tongue twisters themselves.
Thanks to costume designer Alison Brown, these strange phrases find physical form in a multi-tiered skirt, a three-level cake, a brain/frog hybrid, a web of tin cans and an aunty in a tent. By the end, the stage is covered in colourful props, the visual wonder matching the playful possibilities of the spoken word.
The festival runs at various venues, Edinburgh, until 1 June.