Here’s a question for all of us: why does theatre, which is labelled, ‘Children’s’, often involve greater freedom of creativity than other genres? It’s a question prompted having just seen Le Navet Bete’s new production of Dick Tracy.
Here’s the plot: crime fighter and all round good guy, Dick Tracy (Dan Bianchi), thwarts the evil designs of the city’s Mr Big, namely Big Boy Caprice (Nick Bunt) and his stooges, who he catches red-handed in a series of jewel heists and bank jobs by using his preternatural prescience and general baddie biffing skills. Twisted with anger at being foiled repeatedly by our model citizen and unable to bear it any longer, Caprice cooks up a dastardly plot to discredit Dick and get him banged up and out of the way. In supposedly going legit, Big Boy’s big plan is to dupe the citizens of the city into – supposedly temporarily – leaving their homes whilst his gift to the people, the regeneration of the city, takes place. His sinister, secret intention is however so wicked I couldn’t possibly speak of it here. Confounded by this apparent change of heart on the part of Caprice, Dick is tricked into such enormities one can barely bring oneself to think of them.
Suffice to say they involve a box of the sweetest tiny kittens who never did anyone any harm – and an orphanage, full of innocent little orphans. I don’t think I’m breaking a confidence in reporting that, happily, goodness and the law finally win out, but not before awful things happen to Dick’s girlfriend, the ever patient, Tess (Matt Freeman), daughter of the city’s police chief (Al Dunn).
The story, which is told at breakneck speed, uses every trick in the book; involves audience participation, song, dance, visual jokes, verbal jokes, slapstick, quick change, masks, dummies, toys, bangs… you get the picture. So back to my question, which might have such an answer as: ‘We haven’t got to do anything in particular so we can do everything’. And it’s not as if we are without precedent; those Greek inventors of comedy as we know it, such as Aristophanes, were doing pretty much the same thing more than a couple of millennia ago, freely mixing satire, fantasy, bawdy, parody, slapstick, caricature, irony, absurdity and farce. After all what could be more ‘absurd’ than in Aristophanes’ Birds when two old men come on with birds tied their wrists which are being used as a kind of compass?
The great wonder of theatre is what you can get away with if done with conviction. It’s the great joy of companies like Le Navet Bete that they take our imaginations out for some vigorous exercise and they come back the better for it, having briefly rediscovered our inner child. ★★★★☆ Graham Wyles 29/05/15
