Review: Where Has All The Fruit Gone? Edfringe

Taiwanese company Yinalang Group brings Where Has All the Fruit Gone? to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer, staged at Assembly Roxy. It’s a show aimed at ages 5+ with a story reflecting on childhood, difference and discovering what you want to be in life.

Much of the set is constructed from cardboard boxes, within which props and ideas are secreted, which nicely sets the scene to immerse yourself in imagination, memory and connection. We’re told about a Taiwanese family custom, remembered from childhood, of sending seasonal fruits in a parcel as gifts during holidays. At the time of the Taiwanese Lunar New Year, that fruit is the tangerine.

For those of us in the audience unfamiliar, it’s interesting to find out more about a different culture. We learn the difference between Solar and Lunar New Year, and the traditions around the latter. These include the gifting of red envelopes filled with money, which left some people in the audience looking a bit bemused. This is not a commonplace practice in the West, and for an audience of such young years, it would be helpful to take a beat to ensure the meaning is understood before pushing on with the story, where it becomes a plot point later.

The show explores ideas of difference, and looks at how things can have varied forms but still be tangerine. It offers a positive message that you don’t always have to decide right away what you are going to be like, which is a lovely idea, and is presented in some inventive ways.

Home is very much at the centre of the performance, and fun moments include a family represented by assorted tangerine-coloured household items, and a tangerine made out of a balloon. There’s also an abstract mum figure whose arms stretch halfway across the set and whose eyes are projected onto a screen in the middle, which the children seemed to like. Towards the end, audience members are invited by the two very charming performers to do magic painting on the screen, picturing something they’d like in their future, which rounds off the story with active enablement. It’s an enjoyable show but somewhat patchy in its narrative and timing.

The story arc is quite confusing in places, and I certainly took a moment to consider how we’d got from one place to another on several occasions, so a young audience might too. I was taken aback in one scene when I thought they were about to drink ‘Toilet Duck’ live on stage! (They didn’t; it was fine). A shadow sequence of a journey at the end is a little overlong, disrupting the transition into the finale. However, come that end, the audience has been immersed in some fun, inventive interactions and is left with positive messages about possibility and transformation: definitely worth coming along for that.

Produced by Yinalang Group

Where has All the Fruit Gone? is aimed at ages 5+ and plays at Assembly Roxy as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival  until Saturday 24 August