Theatre

Puffin

Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock

Mary Brennan

two stars

The Beacon’s upstairs Gallery space looks directly out, through a wall of window glass, onto the Clyde where puffers used to chug by. No puffers in sight now but there is – according to this new touring production by Snap Elastic – the possibility of a puffin coming in to roost.

That’s the heartfelt hope of a Girl (Alice Mary Cooper) when she arrives, in cream safari suit, and meets – well, it’s Claire Willoughby in a long white night-gown, playing a saxophone.

The parpy-squeaky noises she’s been producing have reduced the young audience to fits of delighted giggles. Now, it appear, they’re puffin-speak which Cooper is able to translate for us:it’s mainly salmon-salmon-salmon – a cue for Cooper to feed Willoughby a wee sweetie fish.

So Willoughby is a puffin? Not when the two of them step inside the roped-off set (designed by Mamoru Iriguchi) where they will wait - now seemingly as (human) friends – for the arrival of the migrating sea birds. It’s an awkward transition, in a production (for audiences aged 7+) where the well-intentioned desire to inform everyone about the threat to wildlife posed by climate change really saps the theatricality out of the hour-long piece.

Cooper’s character is so obsessed with all things puffin that she becomes a didactic bossy-boots, rattling out copious facts that the strangely naive Willoughby finds boring. She behaves as if she’s the one more attuned to nature, though it’s not clear where these instincts come from – is she maybe still a puffin?

Some fidgeting in the back rows suggest that – despite more entertainingly silly sounds, some jolly songs and flurries of wiggly-waggly bums – creators Cooper, Willoughby and Eszter Marsalkó (who also directs) have over-egged the preachy-teachy narrative.

Being presented in broad daylight didn’t help define different time-scales or locations in proceedings, but even so this Puffin was disappointingly very much at sea.