Box Tale Soup have a reputation for inventive staging which combines puppetry with live actors, earned from previous literary-themed hits such as Northanger Abbey and The Turn of the Screw. So the story of Gulliver’s Travels is absolutely perfect for them, as they take on all four parts of Jonathan Swift’s classic.
As the story begins and the shipwrecked Gulliver wakens, he finds himself bound and trampled over by the diminutive Lilliputians – and there are plenty of giggles as the puppets jump up and down on performer Noel Byrne’s stomach. Having won the trust of his tiny captors, Gulliver blots his copybook with his unorthodox quenching of a fire at the palace. And that’s just the first of his adventures.
The transitions between the sections are beautifully performed, with the cast singing sea shanties and combining physical theatre with rearrangement of the stage furniture for the next part of his journey. The set begins as the deck of a ship, complete with masts and sails, but those components are dismantled and reassembled seamlessly as the story goes on. The props, made by the company from recycled and found materials, are used in multiple configurations with remarkable ingenuity – a particular favourite was the ship’s wheel repurposed as a giant farmer’s eyebrows, before that image is used on a smaller scale to denote the transfer of the character to an actor.
That’s because Gulliver is now the puppet in the land of the giant Brobdingnagians, where he learns that his own home England is not as advanced as he’d like to think. The ability to mine the humour inherent in Gulliver’s relative size compared to the people he meets, yet not shy away from the serious satirical points that Swift was making, is quite an achievement.
Often adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels skip the more complex second half, but Box Tale Soup manage it with aplomb. The section featuring the floating island with its satire on esoteric impractical scientific research is undoubtedly harder to dramatise, but the story ends with the elegant Houyhnhnms and barbaric Yahoos – both well suited to their trademark puppetry.
Gulliver is simply wonderful, and holds spellbound an audience with the widest age range you’re likely to see on the Fringe. It’s a magical adaptation for everyone, from the very youngest of children on up.