Edinburgh international children’s festival review – raucous fun

Traverse, Edinburgh, and North Edinburgh Arts Centre
Baba Yaga, a delirious take on Slavic folklore, and the masterful one-man show Stick By Me offer joyful explorations of rules and how to break them

So much of growing up is about learning the rules of the game. For a child, making sense of what is and isn’t permitted is endlessly perplexing. No surprise then that in at least two of the shows in the Edinburgh international children’s festival, the theme of rules and rule-breaking looms large.

“If you follow all the rules, you miss out on all the fun,” says Christine Johnston in the title role of Baba Yaga, a co-production between Scotland’s Imaginate and Australia’s Windmill. With her handbag hat and pompom necklace, she looks like a woman who knows a thing or two about transgression. A kind of Technicolor Cruella de Vil with the added swagger of a drag queen, she has taken residence in an upper storey of Poultry Park apartments and annoyed the neighbours by keeping pets, sticking drawing pins in the walls and playing loud music.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2LD5UEg