Review: Hopeful Monsters, The Well Walk Theatre

Do you remember Mr Benn on the TV as a child? He was a cartoon character who went through the changing room of a costume shop, where his world was transformed, enabling him to have unexpected adventures in unusual places. Stepping in to the exquisite Well Walk Theatre is a similar experience. Out front there’s a beautiful box office and bookshop, behind which is a gorgeous café serving delicious coffee and cakes. Quirky and sophisticated, there’s a captivating vintage feel to it all. And down a secret set of stairs is a jewel of a theatre seating only 55 people: perfect for an extraordinary puppet show.

The Hopeful Monster website describes a hopeful monster as “a mutant with an evolutionary future and the potential to take its species in an unexpected new direction”. And that exactly sums up this amazing piece of theatre: it’s a unique entertainment that celebrates the natural world, inviting the audience to enjoy it, to interact, and perhaps consider a different relationship with it.

Performed by three exceptional puppeteers (Ella Mackay, Bori Mezo and Emily Dyble), this is a breathtaking, intoxicatingly theatrical work. They are unseen, in pitch blackness apart from their hands and arms, and intertwined in a tiny space: yet from the dark they make unimagined existences excitingly perceptible.

We begin in a primordial soup, where a plant formed from two hands reaches up to the light. Spores pop delightfully from it into the air. With elegant fluidity, hands and arms travel across the dark space, forming a multitude of new creatures through shapes and movements, and they grow organically. Topher Dagg’s stunning lighting design gives an otherworldly, colourful aesthetic to this vision, which effortlessly encourages curiosity in both the artform and the narrative from an eager audience, leaning in entranced.

The puppeteers perform superbly as a team, intricately weaving hands, arms and fingers in a multiplicity of combinations and using a bare minimum of props to form bizarrely wonderful characters. We’re introduced to frogs and giraffes; stalk-eyed crabs hilariously compete for the best rock; and a wonderful mummy and baby bird duo has the wide-eyed children in the audience explosively shrieking with joy. Young and old spectators are entirely engrossed, trying to fathom what is evolving from these transformational hands, and how the creatures are shaped. The storytelling throughout is marvellously detailed yet unafraid to be dramatic; a memorable David Attenborough-style lion and gazelle chase across the savannah launches from the darkness with thrilling spectacle.

Michael Hyland’s extraordinary musical score creates a harmonious stream of moods and atmospheres, telling of activity, emotion and location. It provides a meandering pathway, which the characters move along in rhythm or respond to with lively, idiosyncratic actions that fill them with buoyant, bubbling personality.

The form of the piece is wonderfully cyclical, with the organic forms returning back to the earth from which they emerged. And come the end of the show the shadowy puppeteers in semi-darkness remind us of the human connection with the stage that is our natural world. All of life is here, in an astonishing capsule containing everything we need to survive: imagination, growth, collaboration, joy, amazement and above all new possibility.

In essence, hand puppetry costs nothing and is universally understood. It was enormously uplifting to see how, post-show, children and adults alike embraced it, keen to demonstrate the creatures they too could imagine and manifest with their own hands. Hopeful Monsters is an enchanting, fabulously entertaining show but also impressively empowering and inclusive, telling how humans and nature can make beauty together. It’s a production not to be missed at any age!

Devised and created by Hopeful Monster (Bori Mezo, Ella Mackay and Eti Meacock)
Puppets & Props made by Eti Meacock with assistance from Ella Mackay
Music by Michael Hyland
Lighting design by Topher Dagg
Developed with support from Creative Scotland, Moving Parts Scratch Space, Cumbernauld Theatre at Lanternhouse, Curious School of Puppetry and Outside Eyes at Tron Theatre Glasgow

Hopeful Monsters plays at Well Walk Theatre until Sunday 20 April.