Little Angel Theatre Studios

Returning to the Little Angel, Matt Aston’s adaptation of Benji Davies kids’ books about the delightful relationship between a young boy, Noi, and the little whale he rescues after a storm heads off on tour, calling at Polka over half-term. Ages four-to-eight.

This review is from 2022. Nemesis; hubris; redemption; headgear. Those are pretty much the main themes of Jon Klassen’s wonderous trilogy of picture books that kicked off in 2011 with the seminal I Want My Hat Back, in which a dopey bear wanders the forest looking for his missing red party hat, eventually clocking that it has been nicked by a rabbit, which it’s then very strongly implied that the bear goes on to kill and eat. Followed by This Is Not My Hat – in which a small fish soliloquises to the reader about how he’s definitely going to get away with stealing a big fish’s bowler hat – and We Found a Hat – in which two tortoise pals must decide what to do with a sombrero – the three books contain no shared characters or plot, but are linked by Klassen’s gloriously deadpan, almost woodcut-like drawings, sparse dialogue and bracingly morally ambiguous humour. The same qualities have also made the books tricky to adapt: the National did a sort of maximalist fantasia on I Want My Hat Back a few years ago that was a lot of fun but didn’t especially resemble the source material beyond the key plot beats. The basic problem is that a literal stage adaptation of I Want My Hat Back would only be about ten minutes long, and it’s difficult to see how you can convey Klassen’s distinctive visual style with human actors. But that was before there was a trilogy, and – crucially – before the pandemic. This stage version of the three books started life as a lockdown project for designer...