This vibrant kids' show from puppet theatre troupe Theatre-Rites is about rediscovering one's inner child and growing into adulthood: two things its young audience is unlikely to be doing anytime soon. But if any underlying message to ‘Mojo’ is aimed more at accompanying adults than their offspring, children are hardly going to mind when their senses are being tickled by so much glorious sight and sound.
It begins with one sharp-suited, glottal-chanting performer ‘summoning’ the rest of the cast from their starting positions in the audience, luring them individually through a playfully shifting neon archway.
After some diversionary but spectacular puppetry business – wherein a lanky, gyrating stickman with some impressive moves is constructed out of blue neon pipes – the archway slides away. Inside, the performers have amalgamated into a sort of twee nuclear family, who devote the rest of the show to raising a puppet daughter, who we follow from burbling, mischievous babyhood to pop-socked, stroppy adolescence.
The joyous fluidity of the puppetry is a large part of the thrill: the identikit human cast channel their personalities into their puppet-daughter, who they manipulate to gape cutely at magic tricks, boogie down furiously and get into bizarre scrapes with an inquisitive luminous bird and a frankly pretty creepy giant spider. And there’s kinetic dancing, gloriously nonsensical songs and pin-sharp musicianship: a glowing eruption of freewheeling fun.