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.
Read the full review in this week’s TES Friday magazine
- The Theatre’s next production, from December, is Beauty and the Beas t, but the Little Angel supports two touring productions a year, designed to be fully transferable to any primary school gym.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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