The curtains were brought down on AHA!, Ranga Shankara’s international theatre fest for children, with a joint production by Ranga Shankara, Bangalore, Figurentheatre, Switzerland and Schnawwl Theatre, Manheim.
Squirrel’s Birthday comes a couple of years after Ranga Shankara and Schnawwl collaborated to create the immensely successful Boy with a Suitcase . With the same director, Andrea Gronemeyer, and the addition of a Swiss collaborator, Squirrel’s Birthday promised to be quite a multicultural experience for the little ones.
Using handmade puppets and miniature theatre, the production restricted its audience capacity to 75, putting the children front and centre. At its sold out premiere, Arundathi Nag and Margrit Gysin took to the stage to share the story based on Dutch writer and poet Toon Tellegen’s works. At the end of the hour, the two on stage proved to be as or even more energetic than the young crowd watching them.
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Nag belies her years of work, appearing as fresh-faced and enthusiastic as if it were her first production.
She went on to term it one of the most rewarding experiences that she had in the past few years, and it definitely came through in her acting. Stoic and sincere, she was the perfect foil to Gysin’s multitalented endeavours as the forest animals.
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Gysin, an AHA! veteran from Mimi and Brumm , is magical, flitting from elephant to ant, from playing music to humming it.
And the props she used were no less magical: the wonderfully detailed squirrel puppet and the Pandora’s box containing baking implements were only two of the many visual delights in the production. Squirrel’s Birthday is a nicely conceptualized and wonderfully executed play. It relies on performances and aesthetics to hit one home, and both are perfected here. Themes of universality may be discernable, but for the most part it is without agenda. All in all, it’s a great production for a five-year-old, and an even better one for a 50-year-old. And the honey cake distributed after the production was the cherry on the icing.