‘Bah bah, gug… mirrorball?’ was how a tiny fellow audience member responded to one of the many delightful surprises in this dreamy show from Fevered Sleep – proof positive that there really is a disco revival happening at the moment.
Said mirrorball – which performer Laura Cubitt dextrously dances with during the show’s midsection – is the only element of ‘Brilliant’ that had the three-to-five-year-old audience actively gurgling in vocal glee.
For the most part, they seemed simply entranced by the show, which would be about the right response to this gauzily gorgeous piece set ‘twixt consciousness and dream. In it, Cubitt’s sleeper is drawn into a world of lights in the dark, where she plays with illuminated moons, tugs playful switches, basks in cones of luminescence and hangs out with David Leahy’s, er, stag, who plays a sonorous double bass throughout.
A lovely play about bedtime and a child’s view of the world after dark, the revived 2008 piece is surprisingly similar in structure to Fever Sleep’s recent Young Vic show for adults, ‘Above Me the Wide Blue Sky’. But where that show – also performed by Cubitt – seemed deliberately obtuse in places, ‘Brilliant’ is much more welcoming, a little world of shadow and starlight that’s a wrench to leave.
By Andrzej Lukowski