Oily Cart creates the kind of children’s shows that you want to take home and treasure forever. Its latest intimate epic for three to six-year-olds is a simple story, about a girl who loses her dog and goes to the moon to find him. But it’s the way they tell them that make Oily Cart’s stories so special.
This one chases its own tail delightfully in the round, where it is presented with extraordinary charm and artistry by three engaging performers, a musician who circles proceedings on his amazing melodic tricycle and a convoy of charmingly homemade puppets, bicycles, milk floats, boats and motorbikes.
This is streets ahead of most children’s shows – and, in its deft use of promenade, it leaves many adult theatre companies for dust. Oily Cart’s theatre space is also a playground, where pre-schoolers push their way through chiming bell-laden hoops, then sit quietly around the circular stage and help turn it round and round with their hands.
You’d imagine it would be chaos: instead, the audience is hooked, entranced and utterly persuaded to imagine themselves into the story. Quite simply, Oily Cart makes art for small children: a beguiling aesthetic experience, scaled to fit their curious world and perfectly designed to make them happy.