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Abigail Conway’s brilliant little immersive theatre show is all set to take the makers revolution to the kids. It takes place at Blackhorse Workshops: a fantastic open workshop in Walthamstow where you can show up at all hours and fix and make stuff with metal and wood instead of, presumably, chucking your broken belongings into a landfill pit and moving on.
Which makes it a perfect environment already for kids, who love browsing stuff with sharp edges and industrial tools – and are getting pretty incensed about the environmental apocalypse we’ve cued up for them. The concept for this show is that the children (aged seven-to-11) and their accompanying adults are all tinsmiths. They’re guided, nicely, through rooms that contain ingenious futuramas and making-spaces. The scenarios engagingly illustrate stuff like why tin is better than plastic (through the medium of talking fruit cans), or encourage them to design new machines, at a banquet table under a spectacular canopy of knives, forks and spoons, suspended chandelier-like from the ceiling.
The best bit is that they get to work with the edgy shiny metal, bending and riveting tin into a trumpet – and creating a tinsmith badge with punched initials and a little metal hammer that clicks when you press it.
The narrative is light and active – perfect for short attention spans. It’s site-specific theatre where the theatre is beautifully judged but also really humble: it’s genuinely in service to the site; the makers do a wonderful job of helping kids explore it, without boring them to death or adding lots of random panto crap.
Also: it’s only £5 to go, with a bundle of free tickets available for low-income families. Tin hats off all round – and especially to Waltham Forest and the London Borough of Culture programme, who have made a lovely and important experience accessible for local kids.