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As any parent who has braved the dreary live incarnations of ‘Peppa Pig’ or ‘In the Night Garden’ can attest, a charmingly eccentric pre-schooler TV programme doesn’t necessarily translate into a stage show with the same qualities – the life can get sucked out, leaving you with little more than themed party entertainment.
This fate was surely never going to befall ‘Hey Duggee’, however. The CBeebies cartoon – which concerns a Cub Scout-alike collection of polygonal animal children called The Squirrels and their eponymous dog carer-slash-scout master Duggee – has a genuine studied cool to it. While creator Grant Orchard isn’t involved in ‘Hey Duggee: The Live Theatre Show’, I assume he has enough clout to stop something totally naff being done to his baby. Most hearteningly, there are some pretty heavyweight theatre names involved: director Matthew Xia and writer Vikki Stone are not ones to phone it in.
Presumably, they’re bona-fide fans of the show itself. They certainly wouldn’t be the only adults. The episodes might be just five minutes a go, but it teeters on the verge of being something that can be enjoyed sans sprogs – genuinely inspired riffs things like ‘Apocalypse Now’ or The Cure are clearly not being directed solely at pre-schoolers.
What Xia and Stone haven’t done is surrender to the show’s more outré moments and sling together a totally out-there entertainment. What they have done is craft it with skill and care – a quality piece of family entertainment that makes smart use of beloved moments of eccentricity from the show.
Long story short, Duggee and the Squirrels are staging a theatre show and have to learn how to do so by accumulating their trademark Scout-style badges. The Squirrels and Duggee are big, bright puppets lovingly made by Yvonne Stone and Daisy Beattie and deftly manipulated by a visible human cast, while actor Lunga Anele-Skosana gamely costumes up as various incidental characters from the show – Chew Chew the panda, Mrs Weaver the beaver, more – who help the Squirrels in their various tasks.
It’s all quite wholesome but spiked with bits of the show’s trademark weirdness, notably a thrillingly daft space-flight fantasy sequence in which a series of ridiculous aliens are briefly deployed and some giant balls representing planets are lobbed into the audience.
On the way in, kids are given a sheet of stickers replicating the badges the Squirrels accumulate throughout the show, which those patient enough to not burn through theirs straight away can bestow on themselves as the appropriate moments in a lovely interactive flourish.
It’s actually possibly pitched less at grown-ups than the cartoon is. But for the adults there is a very smart deployment of show’s signature tune ‘The Stick Song’, a skronking piece of techno that clearly appeals to ex-ravers at least as much as nursery kids. It’s amusingly trailed and teased throughout. But I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to confirm that it is broken out in all its glory come the end, a truly euphoric note to finish on.
I’d love to see a ‘Hey Duggee’ live outing that had more input from the team behind the TV show, because this live version is essentially a brilliant tribute to the cartoon rather than a continuation of it. There is a certain amount of untapped potential. But make no mistake, this is a joyous piece of family entertainment that truly understands its subject. Theatre badges all round!