The Stage Review – If Only The Lonely Were Home

If Only the Lonely Were Home

by Kevin Berry

Wendy Harris saw Finegan Kruckemeyer’s The Tragical Life of Cheeseboy at the ASSITEJ world children’s theatre festival in Australia, where it had a tremendous reception, and she immediately asked him to write a play specially for Tutti Frutti. She wanted a sort of love story for children – and here it is.

Megan Brooks (Penny) and Jason James (The Lonely) in If Only the Lonely Were Home at York Theatre RoyalPhoto: Peter Byrne

The Tasmanian writer has a quirky, audacious, wonderfully unfettered way of looking at life that is fully in tune with children’s thinking. His verbal imagery is delectable. Townsfolk bring along the things they love – a photo of the wind, some lightning in a jar – marvellous.

Jason James plays The Lonely, a youngster who cannot make friends. He would dearly love to be friends with Penny, played by Megan Brooks. Then someone falls off a bike, Lonely’s dog is blamed and Lonely stays home rather than face the world. Will he ever come out?

Melancholy is kept in check. This is a tale with charm, humour and real feeling. It does not preach but it does find a way.

James appeals as Lonely and in no way is his character a wimp. He knits but really very badly and his decidedly eccentric jumpers and scarves litter the stage. Megan Brooks is a lively, free-wheeling presence. They each dance but their dancing could be better.

Composer Ivan Stott gives the actors a captivating string soundtrack, with Brooks playing live violin, and some really smashing songs. The title song is an immediate, sing-along hit.

View the original article here: http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/23999/if-only-the-lonely-were-home

York Press Review – If Only The Lonely Were Home

If Only The Lonely Were Home

The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until April 25

By Charles Hutchinson »

Finegan Kruckemeyer has written 27 plays, one for each year of his life.

If Only The Lonely Were Home has made its way to Yorkshire from his Tasmanian homeland and we must hope that further flights of Kruckemeyer’s imagination will float our way.

Leeds company Tutti Frutti surely will be tempted to renew his acquaintance, as his writing wholly fits their mission statement in the programme notes for this co-production with York Theatre Royal, namely to “delight children with meaningful, imaginative, visual story-based theatre”.

“When you are cold, another person’s jumper always fits,” writes Kruckemeyer, in a typically comforting sentiment in a story as full of wool and knitting as Alison Heffernan’s fantastical set design of rug-covered miniature town buildings.

Kruckemeyer’s play is a two-hander tale of schoolboy The Lonely (Leeds actor-dancer Jason James), who has not been seen for a long time, his three-tiered house standing quiet on the furthest edge of town, far from the city-centre home of Penny Ericson (Lancastrian actor-violinist Megan Brooks). “They like all the same things, they just don’t know it yet,” the audience of four to seven-year-olds is told.

In his eyrie, left alone by his busy explorer parents with only his dog for company, The Lonely knits (very badly) to pass the time. He will not come out, not even when everyone brings to his doorstep the items they most love: a photo in the wind, a song you sing in cars, some lightning in a jar.

Such imagery by Kruckemeyer has everyone smiling, all except The Lonely, who ignores all these enticements to venture out, but Penny will stay by his door until he does.

The story-telling is similarly patient, but the children are enchanted, enjoying the winding drama and its theme of loneliness, loss, friendship and emotional expression, and the warm, colourful performances of James’s quiet Lonely and Brooks’s more voluble Penny. Working together for the first time but steeped in children’s theatre and theatre-in-education, they bond naturally, their contrasting styles bringing out the best in each other under Wendy Harris’s direction.

Ivan Stott’s string-driven songs and incidental music are another joy, maximising Brooks’s violin playing too, in an hour-long production as memorable as Finegan Kruckemeyer’s name.

* If Only The Lonely Were Home, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until April 25, then on tour nationally from April 27. York box office: 01904 623568.

Read the review here -

http://www.thepress.co.uk/whatson/theatre/4254859.Review__If_Only_The_Lonely_Were_Home__The_Studio__York_Theatre_Royal__until_April_25/