“The two work well together and it shows. As is often the case with such loosely tailored pieces there is much that is self-referential and lots of banter with the audience including a shameless plug for a touted CD. Director, Craig Edwards, has allowed the performers to do their own thing whilst making sure the comedy is not lost in self-indulgence. It’s a cracking recycling of all those little nuggets of Elizabethan history you learned at school.”

This version by the Norwich Puppet Theatre is designed for little folk of four and up so the moral part of the story concerns innocence and deception with some fun being had on how the wolf is outsmarted by the chattering washerwomen who live in Little Red’s village. The carved wooden rod puppets are non-naturalistic with a hint of expressionism, the kind of exaggeration one finds in many children’s books. The puppeteers, wearing black, are in full view and do a good job in characterizing the puppets in their voices.

“. . . The customary Stoppardian leaps of imagination are transmuted here into leaps between epochs and the play’s USP is the way it skips nimbly between the early nineteenth and latter twentieth centuries, drawing our attention, by way of a number of devices including speculations about rice pudding and jam, to the uni-direction of time or ‘entropy’. . . This stylish English Touring Theatre production offers everything a Stoppard fan might look for, fizzing as it does with intellectual challenge and might even gain a few converts along the way.”