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Since the copyright on Beatrix Potter’s works expired a decade ago, it’s been open season on rabbits. Many youngsters these days will have been introduced to Peter Rabbit et al not through Potter’s whimsically menacing books, but the disconcertingly action-packed CBeebies show or the aggressively ironic James Corden movies.
Kiddie immersive show ‘Peter Rabbit’s Easter Adventure’ is another one that’s very much not in the literal spirit of the books. But it is a lovely little perambulatory theatre show that allows small audiences to take a hop, skip and a jump through Covent Garden while meeting some familiar faces, rendered in puppet form.
The show begins in a room above the Chestnut Bakery, where we’re met by an actor playing Beatrix Potter, who explains that she’s been so busy with her nature studies that she’s forgotten to buy Peter and the gang any Easter presents (you know: Easter presents. Those presents you… get people… at Easter).
Despite the puppet Peter’s evident disappointment, we’re ‘saved’ by the news that his nemesis Mr McGregor has abducted Jemima Puddleduck. We’re soon off on a mission to rescue her.
It’s not Shakespeare. More to the point, it’s not Potter: a long section in which a plummy Benjamin Bunny bangs on about something called ‘carrot brain’ feels both never-ending and dramatically off-piste from the vibe the author was going for.
Still, it’s perhaps best to think of the post-copyright Potter menagerie as more like a series of wholesome stock characters than anything that you can expect to function as a coherent world. It’s really nice to see the kids don their rabbit-ear headbands and hop around the streets of Covent Garden, and whatever the limits of the show’s script, the fact that it’s got a series of wholesome little performance spaces set up in one of the busiest tourist spots on earth is delightful – it makes you look at the market with fresh eyes, and helps you appreciate how un-jaded with central London your offspring are at this age. It is, in general, a show that’s well crafted for a young audience, taking them on a gentle adventure that’s interesting but never overloading.
It takes some liberties, and it’s a bit of a swizz charging a bolt-on price for the play area at the end, but it’s ultimately very sweet: the perfect Easter present!