As the father of two children under three, my advance feelings about Boing!, the new Sadler’s Wells Christmas show for kids, could be summed up in a single phrase: déjà vu.
In Boing! two grown men in pyjamas – b-boy dancers Wilkie Branson and Joel Daniel, who, along with the director Sally Cookson, initiated this production at Bristol Old Vic – pretend to be young brothers on Christmas Eve. Gripped by anticipation of Santa’s imminent arrival, the insomniac siblings leap about on a springy bed that dominates the stage and tussle acrobatically over their teddy bears.
Scarcely a day passes in our house without a bed being jumped on; the thud of toys hurled across a room is a recurring theme on the soundtrack to my life. And if you are looking for wily ways to outfox sleep, you could do worse than ask my children. So as my eldest, Oscar, and I headed to Boing! at the weekend, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I might as well be taking a pony to watch a pantomime horse.
I needn’t have worried. If Oscar was unconvinced by Branson and Daniel’s attempts to recreate the absolute commitment and unforced glee with which small children routinely embark on so many of the activities depicted, he didn’t say. If he was disappointed by the odd lapse in choreographic precision, or troubled by the slightly grating way in which the dancers would burst into shouty speech, he didn’t let on.
While older children in the audience laughed and hollered as the dancers clowned and bounced and, in a rare burst of absolute physical virtuosity, transformed themselves into free-wheeling robots, Oscar spent the 50-minute duration of the show, his first experience of live theatre, in a sort of stern reverie, teetering somewhere between awe and suspicion. Only on the way out did he start talking about the things he’d liked: the music (a reassuringly gentle score by Alex Vann), the scribble-covered set, the “boinging”.
In the end, the easy charm of Boing! won me over, too, although I couldn’t help regretting that, in aiming at a young audience, it sets its sights a little low. An extended sequence during which the brothers used a duvet to catapult their cuddly toys into the air was one of many that felt too slight, too like something we could all do at home. Whereas the astonishing instant in which Daniel, lying flat on his back, sprang up like a startled salmon and onto his feet – now that was something I hadn’t seen before.
Until Dec 31. Tickets: 0844 4124300
