Jonah and the Whale

Little Angel Theatre

The story of Jonah, saved from the waves by the miraculous arrival of an accommodating whale, forms the basis of the Little Angel Theatre’s latest production. It’s an appropriate choice for the Islington puppet theatre, as the show for over-fours marks the Little Angel’s own joyous moment of salvation.

After 40 financially precarious years, the tiny north London theatre was forced to close in April, tipped over the edge by the death of a long-standing private benefactor and the loss of its council funding. Following a determined public campaign, it has managed to raise the pound;180,000 it needed to keep going.

One of its major challenges is shaking off its twee and olde worlde image. “There’s been a perception that we’re caught in the past, telling stories that aren’t relevant to today’s children,” admits the theatre’s new education officer, Slavka Jovanovic. “But that hasn’t been true for a long time. Our own productions and the touring work we receive are hugely diverse, with lots of stories from many cultures. We have a good balance now.”

The range of stories is also backed up by a variety of puppetry techniques. There’s still a place in the programme for traditional wooden marionettes on strings, but you’re as likely to encounter glove puppets, shadow puppets or giant rod puppets, and shows that make full use of the auditorium, mixing live action and music with film and video.

The new show, Jonah and the Whale, is a rumbustiously inventive production that should prove once and for all that the Little Angel is committed to boundary-breaking work. “It’s been quite a revolution,” explains designer Sophia Lovell Smith, who has painted the entire auditorium from floor to ceiling to create an utterly involving space. “Although there’s a lot of puppetry in it, the show is also more set-based, and more actor-based.”

“It’s about storytelling as much as puppetry,” adds performer Josh Darcy, whose speciality is ventriloquism.

Featuring sea shanties, gurgling whale-belly noises, the sound of sea battles, desert winds and whale song, the biblical story of Jonah is told as a play within a play. The show centres on an English sailor, captured during the battle of Trafalgar in the Napoleonic War, and imprisoned inside a French ship. With little else to do during his incarceration, the seaman carves himself a few companions and acts out stories using the handful of day-to-day objects around him.

A wicker basket becomes the whale’s eye, a piece of rope becomes the worm that eats the gourd under which Jonah shelters, and the carousing folk of Ninevah City are fashioned from spoons and forks.

“You can create such a sense of wonder using simple things,” insists director Steve Tiplady (who won a Time Out Live Award 2002 for Dust, a show for adults based on the Odyssey). “Using objects imaginatively leaves spaces for kids to fill in; that excites me.”

Although the focus on an Old Testament prophet might seem a retrogressive choice for a theatre intent on updating its image, the cast is keen to stress the story’s broad appeal and the range of issues it addresses. In this retelling, the wicked sinners of Ninevah become naughty children who won’t brush their teeth or go to bed, and insist on playing with their food. “We’re so blooming naughtyI our favourite word is poo,” they sing. “It’s a story about authority,” says Darcy. “God asks Jonah to go to Ninevah to warn them their city is about to be destroyed, and Jonah doesn’t want to go: but some duties you can’t avoid.”

And as Ninevah City is in present-day Iraq, the story has resonant undercurrents.

After the run at the Little Angel, Jonah goes on a national tour of schools from December, supported by a chunky education pack (written by Louise Warren, who also wrote the play) covering topics from life at sea and natural history to puppet-making ideas.

The Theatre’s next production, from December, is Beauty and the Beast, but the Little Angel supports two touring productions a year, designed to be fully transferable to any primary school gym. (This autumn’s touring shows are knockabout glove puppet productions of Romeo and Juliet and The Frog Prince, devised with table-top puppets and visible puppeteers, soon to be followed by a Celtic-influenced King Arthur.) With the appointment of its first education officer (part-time), the theatre was able to devote a lot of energy to developing education initiatives in the months it was closed. Working with Year 6 pupils from Shapla primary in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, for example (a school with 95 per cent Bangladeshi intake), Little Angel puppet-makers collaborated with an orchestra to create a puppet opera, The Magical Towers of Hamlet, with 10ft-high rod-puppets. If they can secure enough funding to make the education post full-time, they hope to extend such projects nationally.

Split into four age ranges, between four and 10, Saturday morning puppet clubs in the theatre’s workshop offer opportunities to develop construction and performance skills. To broaden access, “pay what you can” performances are starting after school on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. Those taking part in new family days can make a working Victorian-style toy-box theatre which can be used to stage their own productions on Christmas Day (just like in The Railway Children).

“I think it’s the scale of a puppet show that so fascinates children,” says Slavka Jovanovic. “They can relate to the size and the playfulness - it’s like an extension of their own play, and really magical. All drama has that capacity - but puppets go a step beyond.”

Jonah and the Whale runs until November 24 at Little Angel Theatre, 14 Dagmar Passage, London N1 2DN. Booking: 020 7226 1787. Website: www.littleangeltheatre.com. The show then tours nationally. To book a school performance, tel: 020 7359 8581