What The Ladybird Heard

What The Ladybird Heard

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

IT'S not just in bookshops that the name Julia Donaldson acts as a magnet on young readers. Nowadays stage versions of the stories have an inbuilt box-office appeal. But, as this production - adapted and directed by Graham Hubbard - shows, it's not all that easy to take a very short story, like What The Ladybird Heard, and re-model it into an hour-long piece for large-scale venues like the Theatre Royal.

His solution is to create a bounce-along, joining-in pre-amble where the cast go into a tizzy - they're one man short.

Fathers in the audience must have felt a nervous qualm: was the audience participation going to go as far as acting as one of the bad guys? Before tinies could volunteer their parents, a passing usher (hah!) was pressed into service on a colourfully detailed set that looks like Lydia Monks's illustrations for the book.

Before the story can start, however, there's some hands-on resourcefulness that sees everyday objects - a watering can, a bicycle, a wheelbarrow - cunningly morphed into farmyard animals by the cast of four. We help by doing the appropriate baa-oink-quack noises. And then it's time for Donaldson's clever ladybird to appear, in a trick of the lighting that is too magical to give away.

And yes, the ladybird saves the day, and the farmer's prize cow from the song 'n' dance robbers whose doolally, knockabout style reduces youngsters to fits of laughter.

Even so, there's a sense that those in the circle, or far back in the stalls, don't really get the benefit of the unstinting energy or jolly music-making that's rolling along on-stage. A more intimate space would have drawn everyone into the story we heard.