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York Press Review – If Only The Lonely Were Home
April 3, 2009If Only The Lonely Were Home
The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until April 25
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/
