Previous Reviews
***** The Scotsman
by Sally Stott
THE Brackenberg siblings have it all; a loving family, terrific imaginations and a childhood that anyone who has grown up with brothers or sisters and enjoyed performing home-made songs, making up extravagant dance routines, and stuffing their face with cake will relate to. Freya, aged seven and three-quarters, and ten-year-old twins Finnley and Sophia, have an idyllically ramshackle upbringing, looked after by their loving middle-class parents, who have their own sense of quirky liberal-minded fun. Set somewhere between the late 1970 and 80s, this is an incredibly inviting show that will have you thinking "I want to be in this family!" But when the Brackenberg parents die in a car crash, this world falls apart. The reality of the children's orphaned situation feels like a knife plunging into your chest. It is difficult to imagine another piece in which you feel so strongly for the death of two characters, after knowing them so briefly. Conveyed through an imaginative use of household objects and underpinned by nostalgia for a bygone age, the story shifts between invigorating moments of high-energy humour and heart-wrenching tragedy. It's a heady combination that sets the soul alight. Particularly memorable is the "Brackenberg Battenberg Theatre", where the children relive memories of their time with their parents using large and mini Battenburg cakes to represent family members. It's silly, childish and incredibly sad. It's a surprise to learn that the story is entirely fictional, devised by the cast (Shamira Turner, Clare Beresford and Dom Conway) and director (Alex Scott), as it feels like such an incredibly truthful portrayal of a child's view of death. The performers have a terrific dynamic (in this performance, Scott played Finnley), leaving you wondering whether they might not be related in real life. A final scene, in which we share Freya's eighth birthday, beautifully epitomises the contrasts of childish joy and grown-up sadness that make up the piece as a whole. While there are worse places to deal with choked-back tears than the luxurious Radisson's bathrooms, it might be an idea to bring tissues, as this is a sincere and moving show.
**** Broadway Baby
by Oli Seadon
It is always exciting to find a young company at the Fringe who demonstrate real and tangible potential to create vibrant, vivid and affecting new work. Little Bulb Theatre are one such company and Crocosmia, ‘An explosion of fast-paced visual storytelling following the Brackenberg siblings and their attempts to make sense of the world’, is originally, ingeniously and shudderingly effective.
The Brackenberg siblings are twins Finnley and Sophia, both ten years old, and younger sister Freyja, who is not eight but rather seven and three quarters. They guide us through stories of their life at home and their relationships with each other, all the while trying to figure out where they fit into the world and what it means to be alive.
We see birthdays, Christmas, premature attempts at shaving, their Superficial Underwater Orchestra (or ‘Superfishy Underwater Orc’) and the gently but searingly told account of their parents’ death in a car crash. The Brackenberg siblings, much like this theatre company, are unusually perceptive for their age and so the knowingly naïve telling of these stories gives way to reveal wise and resonant insight into love and life and loss.
The stories are told through romantic slide shows, bulb experiments and, among other means, a whimsical piece of puppetry featuring the Battenberg Brackenberg Cake Community – two big Battenbergs for Ma and Pa Brackenberg, three miniatures for the three children, all of these being hurriedly eaten by the over-enthusiastic and cake-hungry storytellers.
Little Bulb Theatre’s storytelling methods are constantly inventive and the decision to background the show with the Brackenberg parents’ record collection is inspired. An unholy union of Bing Crosby, Sigur Ros, Bob Dylan and Cyndia Lauper somehow works immaculately well, each piece giving even greater texture to the scene it accompanies. The vivid and beautifully constructed scene where the Brackenberg children wait in the orphanage becomes crushingly sad when accompanied by Goldberg Variations, bringing tears to the cheeks of this cynical reviewer.
Then from tears to a great feeling of warmth, generated by the glowingly upbeat and colourful final scene. It’s Freyja’s birthday and, despite their looming grief, Finnley and Sophia enlist our help to make this celebration special. Balloons fill the stage, party horns sound and a glimmer of light returns to their eyes; a light so nearly extinguished by their parents’ death.
Much like the light bulb Freyja plants in the soil, which grows and never goes out, perhaps vivid imagination can indeed be a substitute for real loss, keeping memories blindingly alive in our minds.
Touching and funny, Crocosmia a quiet hit
In a gorgeous hour full of gentle quirks and affectionate oddities, three performers play Geoffrey and April Brackenberg and their three children: Finnley and Sophia, who are ten year-old twins, and their younger sister Freya, who is seven-and-three-quarters. The precision about her age is important, because one of the areas where this show excels is in its uncanny portrayal of the mannerisms and speech patterns of its child characters.
The light-hearted first half, warmly conjuring the affectionate 1970s household that acts as the backdrop for the childrens' imaginative lives, is an oddball delight, which makes the sadness of the second part even more affecting. Little Bulb delicately illuminates the way the three children retreat even further into their imagination after the deaths of the adult Brackenbergs.
Provoking tears and laughter in equal measure, this show has been quietly garnering a name for itself, and no wonder. It is a kindly, peculiar and utterly uncynical delight.
Someone has let three fictional children take over a show, and what an intelligent decision that was. From mouth-watering cake puppetry to balloon blowing and light-bulb experiments, this touching performance is a spectacular visual treat brimming with nostalgia. It's easy to become attached to the characters, since you share with them an emotional rollercoaster ride as they come to terms with the death of their parents. It can't be easy to play an extremely young person when you're an adult, but in this instance the acting is incredibly realistic, making this a hauntingly beautiful and upsetting portrayal of innocence and family relationships. The show will leave you crying with laughter, crying with sadness, and possibly wishing you had a carrot for a goldfish.
These are children who blithely re-enact happy memories using hunks of Battenberg cake, who create a beloved pet fish out of a chunk of carrot, and who use a running shoe and a perfume atomiser to represent the well-meaning people who finally adopt them. If the quaintness of the puppetry makes the production sound sentimental, it is at times. But that is balanced by an awareness of the cruelty of children, as the twins gang up on gullible Freya, and by how curiously matter-of-fact they can be, even in the face of the unimaginably awful. It makes the scenes in which they reflect on their prospective parents, and prepare for Freya's eighth birthday party, unbearably poignant – the high points in a beautifully directed, lovingly acted and absorbing show.
It tells the story of the three Brackenberg siblings and their attempts to make sense of a world that gradually falls apart around them, through a sequence of increasingly elaborate and unfailingly wonderful games. And so the youngest child, Freya, constructs a goldfish best-friend from a carrot; so the trio recreate the events of their gradual entry into foster-care with props ranging from a toy tiger to a shoe, and bring to life their favourite memories with the help of the ‘Brackenberg Battenberg Theatre’, a cake construction of their own design that they gradually consume as they play with it. And accompanying all of their adventures are gleefully eclectic samples from their parents LP collection, which the children play, ever-so-carefully, on an old record deck.
But the genius, the absolute genius of the play is the manner in which instead of reducing its underage protagonists’ fragile emotional states into the broadly sketched stereotypes that so much theatre seems to think is the limit of what children are capable of feeling, it acknowledges the astonishing complexity of mindsets in which comedy and tragedy, misery and imaginative mania can and do coexist on a daily basis. Indeed, I saw the entire piece as a celebration of the interminable fortitude and resolve of kids however horrible a situation: of kids far superior to adults in their ability to brush themselves off and start again. Little Bulb have succeeded in putting together something which had me crying into the balloon that I was blowing up for one of its characters’ eighth birthday celebrations – that, I feel, says it all.
[Published Friday, August 22, 2008]
****Glasgow Herald
Mary Brennan
Life after the Edinburgh Fringe can be disappointingly low on opportunities, even for shows that scored good reviews or picked up an award. So hurrah for the "Bricks" - the Arches' scheme that gives interesting and emergent talent the chance to restage their Fringe show at the
Actually, I sat beside a guy who'd already seen Little Bulb Theatre's Crocosmia. Long before the end it was clear why he'd returned. This ingeniously staged three-hander brims over with emotional insights that are rooted in the raw pain and lingering heartache of loss and grief. Three orphans - 10-year-old twins Finlay and Sophie and younger sister Freya - cope with parental death, and with being in care, through rituals of dressing-up and make-believe that recreate memories of past family life.
Suitcases bulging with old vinyl LPs, battered toys and odd objects snatched from home, provide the triggers and the props for brief re-enactments that evoke the rather rum domesticity that's now gone. You sense that these highly imaginative children will slightly baffle the well-meaning folk who adopt them - the sports-loving "new dad" manifests as a running-shoe, his wife is a pink perfume spray. Brilliant. As is the hilarious, suddenly poignant Battenberg Cake Theatre and little Freya's bossy-optimistic planting of a light bulb. It's a remarkable mix of laughter and tears. I'll admit to both.
Carousel of Fantasies
by Matt Truman
Little Bulb Theatre’s Crocosmia is an accomplished debut lovingly crafted from microscopic details into something simultaneously heart-warming and heart-breaking.
At first glance the Brackenberg family seems a tightly-knit, quirky unit with the sort of chirpy romanticism usually reserved for Disney films. Quaintly resourceful and imaginative, the children – Finnley, Sophia and Freya – gnaw goldfish from carrots and learn to trim shaving-foam beards with razor-fingers, while their parents revisit
Accordingly, perspective slides and the children’s actions slip from kooky to coping mechanisms. The nauseating niceties of their parents become the mistaken whimsies of a child’s eye view muddled with faint, fond memories. Finnley, Sophia and Freya – played faithfully, delicately and fidgety by Dom Conway, Shamira Turner and Claire Beresford – seem caught between simultaneous pressures of maturity and regression. Indeed, there is something totemic about their taking on the parental characters; a notion furthered by their devouring of Battenberg cakes used to represent the choicest of family memories in the inspired Brackenberg Battenberg Puppet Theatre.
If that all sounds cutely sentimental and overly intellectual, Crocosmia balances itself out superbly through a constant sense of muted mania. With surrealist snippets such as ‘Freya Knows Best’ and the “Superfishy Underwater Orchestra”, director Alexander Scott has imbued the rhythm and energy of a television magazine show, accompanied by an eclectic soundtrack that manages to combine precision with seeming arbitrariness. Furthermore, the use of language of display is delightful. Sentences stumble and stagger clumsily creating such childish gems as; “Before you shave the beard, you must first have the beard.”
All in all, Crocosmia marks Little Bulb Theatre Company as a company to be watched with the beadiest of eyes. It is a petite, fragile and beautifully original piece of work that will set the sturdiest of chins aquiver – even as it raises a pursed smile. Utterly enchanting.
http://carouseloffantasies.blogspot.com/
Simon Callow’s Fringe Blog
Out of yesterday's random bombardment, I noted 1000 Years of German Humour and a show called Crocosmia which attempts, it says, to make sense of the world through cake puppetry and ingenious bulb experiments. This is all very joyful and infectious.
