Review - A Sonatina

The Victorian Arts Centre Presents

A Sonatina

By

A Teatret Gruppe 38 production

Cast: Bodil Alling, Christian Glahn, Søren Søndberg

Directors: Bodil Alling, Ole Sørensen


Set designer: Claus Helbo


Composer: Søren Søndberg

Arts Centre

12 and 13 November 2016

This marvelous show is full of surprises, the first one being, where we are taken to, to become an audience. Like going down a rabbit hole both physically and metaphorically, down, down we go into the bowels of the Arts Centre to a rehearsal room.  This disorientation surely helps the viewer to be more available and receptive.  

Once the audience is settled after our very physical decent - the work opens with the narrator/storyteller Bodil Alling (an older woman with lovely messed up grey hair) getting things ready for a chicken to welcome the audience.  This is so funny and ridiculous, but also kind of believable as Alling is working with a particularly chatty chook who is comfortable and obviously very well cared for.

A Sonatina is set in and around a glorious little truck with a sort of olden-day trades person’s tray.   This is a very clever arrangement that houses not only the chook, particularly for egg laying, but other props as well, including, a double barreled shot gun.  Well the gun is - fortunately only a figment of imagination that never actually appears.  However through its absence it speaks volumes about the created relationships of the performer’s characters.

The crux of the show is the telling of the Little Red Riding-Hood Fairy Tale with rustic quirky props and musical accompaniment on a double base and trumpet. 

It is a delightful, deep, funny and sometimes dark offering.  Like the good telling of a Fairytale the whole performance holds secrets and inexplicable logic and a weird sort of darkness the feels dream like.  Then of course - it all comes out all right in the end.  And it is presented with a dry wry sense of humour and irony that enriches.  At the same time this ensures children are not talked down to or patronized but rather taken on an unexpected adventure.

Full marks to the Arts Centre for bringing us this rich inspirational cultural exchange from a world class Danish Children’s Theatre Company.

And I have to say this fabulous children’s show took me back to a time when there was interesting Street Theatre being presented in Melbourne –particularly around at the time of the Melbourne Festival when it was called Spoletto.  Culturally we could surely do with more of this.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)