MIRANDA YATES Based on a book by the extraordinarily prolific children's writer Michael Morpurgo, this stage version osets sail with all the misty and unsettling atmosphere of the original.
MIRANDA YATES
Based on a book by the extraordinarily prolific children's writer Michael Morpurgo, this stage version of Why the Whales Came, at Norwich Playhouse, sets sail with all the misty and unsettling atmosphere of the original.
This is a story about two children from a small fishing community who overcome an island's superstitions.
The “childish innocence prevailing over adult cynicism” stuff could have become a bit twee but Morpurgo's interest in the daily lives of people eking out an existence in the harshest conditions dilutes any of that.
Comic and scary scenes arrived at all the right moments, turning the wriggling audience either into stone or giggling fits.
The storms and school bullies might be a metaphor for the violence and confusion of the first world war but it is achieved with subtlety and kept a full house of children rapt. Miranda Yates
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