Off-West End theatre

This review is from November 2018. Huddle returns to the Unicorn for 2024. Penguins, never exactly out of fashion, are particularly on-trend this season thanks to the emperor penguins who made global headlines after a BBC camera crew controversially rescued them from a gully.Huddle, from Filskit Theatre, doesn’t offer anything quite so nerve-wracking, but it’s certainly more good news for everyone’s favourite flightless birds. Against a deadpan animated backdrop of a larger colony, Joseph Barnes-Phillips’s Papa Penguin squawks and waddles and gets up to general penguin business. Of course, he looks like a dude in a penguin suit, and part of the charm of Huddle is how far the creative team have gone with this: Papa Penguin is a sort of semi-anthropomorphised creature, with a small clutch of physical possessions that he hoards on his rusty old sled, above which hangs a line he uses to hang fish on. It’s a slightly surreal but charming flourish.He also appears not to have a mate, but is nonetheless blessed with an egg that duly hatches into Victoria Dyson’s Penguin Chick. The rest of Katy Costigan and Sarah Shephard’s production is basically two adults making penguin noises at each other – and it’s just delightful, packed with nice little details like Dyson’s costume (by Maxwell Nicholson-Lailey), which sheds layers of grey fluff as she slowly advances towards adulthood. Some mild peril kicks in at the end, as Papa Penguin is forced to head out to sea to get more fish and...

A labour of love that has worked its way slowly to the West End over the five years since it debuted at Southwark Playhouse, at its best Jethro Compton’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an extraordinary thing, a soaring folk opera that overwhelms you with a cascade of song and feeling. It is based on F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story, and shares a premise: Benjamin Button (John Dagliesh) is a man inexplicably born at the age of 70, who then begins to age backwards, leading to a strange, exhilarating, sometimes extremely sad sort of life. Writer/director/designer Compton’s interpretation is very different to both Fitzgerald’s and the 2008 David Fincher film starring Brad Pitt. For starters it’s not set in nineteenth century America, but is virtually a love letter to Compton’s native Cornwall, its story spanning much of the twentieth century.  Fitzgerald’s plot is loosely followed, but heavily tinkered with – one of the more significant changes is having Dagliesh’s Benjamin born with a full adult’s mind and vocabulary rather than beginning life as a baby in an old man’s body. More to the point, it has a joy, romance and big-hearted elan that stands in stark contrast to Fitzgerald’s cynicism and the dolefulness of Fincher’s sloggy film. Indeed, despite tragic notes from the off – Benjamin’s mum takes her own life early on – the tone is largely whimsical and upbeat, focussing on the eccentric minutiae of Cornish village life, from oddball shopkeepers to dozy sheep....

Freckle Productions returns with its splendid puppet-driven family adaptation of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's popular book. The hapless Stick Man's domestic idyll – living up a tree with his Stick Lady Love and their trio of stick sprogs – is shattered when an enterprising dog mistakes him for a common or garden piece of wood. Ages three-plus.