IMAGINATE

Mess, Traverse Edinburgh

FIVE STARS

The Gold Digger, Traverse Edinburgh

FOUR STARS

Johannes and Margarethe, Festival Theatre Studio, Edinburgh

FOUR STARS

Dream City, Traverse Edinburgh

THREE STARS

Bounce, Southside Community Centre

TWO STARS

Mary Brennan

Another Imaginate festival has come and gone, the last with Tony Reekie as director: he bade us farewell with a programme that - in terms of performing arts for children and young people - nailed brave, beautiful colours to the mast. Never more so than with Mess, a cleverly whimsical comedy for a 13+ audience about something that is no laughing matter: anorexia. Josephine (Caroline Horton, who also wrote the play) wants her story, her production to look perfect, with a huge orchestra, a revolve, a smoke machine. Instead, she's got an hour with us, assisted by her bumbling boy chum Boris (Hannah Boyde, all anxious good intentions in a Biggles-y flying helmet) and piano-man Sistahl (Seiriol Davies) whose eccentric cool is a humour-hit with all ages.

Centre-stage, like a little doll in a determined party frock, Josephine tries to get a grip on reality. Control is Josephine's bete noir and the trigger for her eating disorder. Retreating to her bedroom, atop an ivory tower (draped in white candle-wick), she measures out her weight loss in victory medals while Boris pleads and chivvies her to eat. Like Sistahl's air of miff when Josephine curtails his sound-effects or his singing, Boris's clumsy gung-ho caring is superbly tragi-comic - but never at the expense of Mess's serious side.

The audience hush that descends when Josephine lapses back into the comfort of controlling her food intake is a mark of how involved, how concerned we've become in what is actually rooted in Horton's personal experience. The laughter in no way diminishes the sad, lonely awfulness of anorexia, it's part of a brave and honest witness to achieving self-acceptance in an imperfect, messy world.

Yee-hah! With some rootsy-tootsy Bluegrass music, a twinkle in the eye and a fine array of cowboy hats, four dudes from Denmark's Teatret Mollen tell audiences (aged 10+) the bitter-sweet story of The Gold Digger (pictured). This is camp-fire reminiscing, where narrative is spliced through with a rich, tuneful vein of hill-billy ditties and Danish folk-song, all carrying echoes of one man's desperate attempts to escape poverty and find happiness. The assumption is that finding gold in far-off America will make Laust Eriksens' dreams come true at home. He'll dig up a fortune, return to a village full of sneering animosity and show them he's defied their ill will and come good. As for his wife and son, twenty-nine years pass before the Gold Digger returns. Whatever fortune he might have, it has cost him dear: his wife is dead, his grown-up son disowns him, the villagers are as mean-spirited as ever.

Despite the plentiful humour, the glorious music-making - banjos, guitars, even a saw come into play - there's no attempt to sugar-coat Laust's experiences, or the reasons why people gamble their future happiness on emigrating. An absolute nugget of mettlesome theatre-making.

So what did happen to Hansel and Gretel after the Witch became toast in her oven? A grey-haired brother and sister, Johannes and Margarethe are willing to tell you - just come inside their little cottage, and they'll tell you how it was back then. Because years later, they haven't really escaped from the Witch. They've clung together, still haunted by the experience even as they take comfort and security from the bond of love that saved them before and sustains them now.

There's a remarkable brinkmanship at work in this production by Junges Ensemble Stuttgart, with Peter Rinderknecht and Sabine Zeininger edging us from present-day welcomes into the very bones of the fear that overtook them. Taking turns to be the Witch - popping out of the wardrobe, or brandishing her broom - they scare themselves and us with an immediacy and intensity that renders an old, familiar story freshly Grimm. The set is a fascinating agglomeration of muddle and memories. And the morsel of gingerbread we're given? Sweet genius!

There's no shortage of energy on-stage when De Dansers (Netherland) cut loose in Dream City. The audiences (aged 6+) won't necessarily get the drift of it - how imagination and dreaming can help you survive real life disasters and fear - but the frenetic brilliance of both music and movement thrilled them into seeing dance with wide, impressed eyes. Lou Brodie's Bounce - set inside a bouncy castle - is a lovely invitation for 5 to 8 year olds to feel, as well as see and hear, a jolly episode of dance-y performance. B-doing! and two colourfully-costumed Bouncees bound acrobatically across the inflatable, every yomp and somersault sending ripples underneath delighted weans. But at this stage of Bounce's development, it's that physicality rather than the music or the voiced-over punning-poetic text that engages them.

Imaginate itself will leap into action again next year.