My nine-year-old goddaughter, Maya, has a question. “How do you make a short poem like The Owl and the Pussycat into a whole play?” And another: “What is a runcible spoon?”
These are both very good questions, and we are hopefully about to find out at The Quite Remarkable Adventures of the Owl and the Pussycat, a new musical version written by the ear-catching young theatrical composer Dougal Irvine and presented by the Belgrade in association with Selladoor.
What Maya and her five-year-old sister Ruby are too young to be aware of, however, is the strange, circular journey that has brought the pea-green boat sailing into Coventry in the first place. Irvine’s musical is based tangentially on Edward Lear’s nonsense poem, but more particularly on the bizarre, novel-length expansion created by Eric Idle in the mid 90s. (And it was at the Belgrade that Idle, John Cleese and company launched the stage debut of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, for three midnight matinees, in January 1971.)
The musical has Idle’s influence all over it – he even makes a disembodied cameo as the voice of the Bong tree – and Hamish Glen’s manic production serves as a kind of Python primer for under-12s. Idle’s main invention was an elaborate backstory involving the extermination of the dinosaurs and the diabolical schemes of a maniacal fire-lord who lives in a volcano. The general gist is that the spirit of nonsense is under threat, and must be recovered from the land where the Bong tree grows in order to save the sensible world from annihilation.
The key philosophical point, however, is how the two animals have come to end up in the same boat, given that they might be seen as natural enemies. The musical presents the triumph of a shy, sweet pair of misfits struggling with a shared sense of inadequacy. Sally Frith’s Pussycat is a vegetarian who loves dancing but lacks a predatory instinct, while Danny Lane’s introverted Owl bears the psychological scars of the awareness that he “flies like a chicken”.
Irvine’s songs are eminently hummable and there’s abundant visual reference to Pythonesque cut-outs and animations. “It looks like a shell,” Maya observes of Libby Watson’s whirling, white set. “Or a lady with a weird ponytail” Ruby adds cryptically. And as veterans of several live Strictly Come Dancing tours, the sisters are particularly impressed with a snappy jive that Puss performs with Lizzie Wofford’s gingham-frocked, all-American pig. “Ten!” Ruby declares enthusiastically. “I give it a nine,” says Maya. “It was too short and didn’t contain all the elements.”
Yet for all its invention, relentless energy and substantial, two-act duration, the musical leaves a critical enigma of Lear’s poem unsolved. “Maybe it’s to do with a piece of cutlery called Sybil” Maya theorises on the journey home. “And maybe she’s in a hurry, so it’s like, ‘Run, Sybil Spoon!’”
- At the Belgrade theatre, Coventry, until 4 March. Box office: 024-7655 3055.
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