High priests of the theatrically random Told By An Idiot are a perfect match for Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen’s droll festive picturebook How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney? Adapted and directed by company leader Paul Hunter, it’s a glorious 50-minute non sequitur that should appeal to anyone with a sense of nonsense.
The title question is posed many times throughout the show, which fails to ever offer a conclusive answer but does get delightfully bogged down in a series of absurd vignettes.
A cast of five chop and change the roles of Santa, his reindeer and miscellaneous others, multitasking their way furiously through sequences that interrogate such important questions as whether Santa does his laundry as he travels (in order to get the chimney soot off) and what do dogs think of Santa. A question asked repeatedly is how does Santa get into flats, a query that it absolutely refuses to answer properly but does drop in a game show sequence in which the audience is invited to offer its own suggestions and the cast try and act them out.
It’s performed on a lovely Sonya Smullen set that somewhat apes the po-faced surrealism of Klassen’s art, but also has two big furry slides on it. They’re suggestive of the curve of a rooftop but mostly they just look incredibly fun.
A younger primary-school audience absolutely lapped it up, though I wonder if the extreme whimsy and lack of any real plot might baffle older kids. But if you’ve got any sense of the absurd, you’ll have a good time. The lack of story might prove trying if it was half an hour long, but like Santa, it doesn’t outstay its welcome.
