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This stage version of Ben Okri’s illustrated kids book takes place not on the Open Air Theatre’s stage, but on the lawn in its hospitality area: an intimate and relaxed setting for this eco parable, adapted and directed by playwright Chinonyerem Odimba.
It’s the story of young Mangoshi (Hannah Akhalu), a girl from an African village whose father implores her to enter the nearby forest on her own, as a sort of coming-of-age ritual and also to bring back a flower that will heal her sick mother. There, eventually, Mangoshi encounters a sassy Baobab tree (Florence Odumosu) that takes her on a journey around the world’s tree populations – including ours! – on a quest that awakens the young girl to the evils of deforestation.
Odimba’s production has a puppyish physical theatre charm to it, and its efforts to make small activists out of the preschool audience are sweet and sincere. After a strong start, I’m not totally sure to what extent the crowd entirely followed what was going on once Mangoshi started trotting around the globe. Khadija Raza’s barebones set of a circle of orange sand struggles to convey the change of location. And the assertions later on that every tree is precious – while noble – do seem to muddy the waters between sounding the alarm over industrial logging and getting the kids started young on nimbyism. I think maybe there’s an issue here that the play is pitched a few years younger than the book (four-plus versus eight-plus) and as a result a degree of nuance has been lost.
Still, ‘don’t chop down trees, they’re great’ is a pretty solid message and it’s sold with infectious good humour and the show’s secret weapon: composer and musician Sura Susso, whose dreamy kora playing gives ‘Every Leaf a Hallelujah’ a sense of scale and spirituality that transcends its relatively humble staging