Review: Hickory Dickory Dock, Little Angel Theatre

There’s always a wide variety of performance styles to choose from during the Little Angel Theatre‘s Children’s Puppet Festival, from marionettes to rod puppets to shadow puppetry. This summer, Garlic Theatre brings its frenetic two-hander Hickory Dickory Dock to grace the stage. This show is performed with traditional glove puppets, theatrically velvet curtains and has a real sense of old-school entertainment. It’s not so much a tightly wound spring as a great big slinky one that wobbles precariously before being set in motion with a precarious trajectory – but it really delivers on laughs for little ones. 

There’s no pretence at a sophisticated plot here: it’s a simple tale of cat and mouse, cake and clocks, but the audience of children ages 3-8 years love it. A chorus of singing mice helps set the scene at the Mouse Clock Museum, where things quickly go wrong. When the mouse clock becomes damaged and is in urgent need of repair, Dock the mouse runs off. Meanwhile, the scene shifts from the museum to inside Mrs Hickory’s house, where a miniature table is perfect to host tea and cake with her ginger cat, Dickory. Here, there’s an unfortunate incident with an annoying alarm clock that results in Mrs Hickory having to order a new one. Slapstick and silliness ensue when the delivery drivers mix up parcels, and the wrong package mistakenly arrives at their house – squeaking. Dickory gets involved, initiating an exciting chase scene that has everybody shrieking with laughter. It’s chaotic!

Puppeteers Iklooshar Malara and Mark Pitman are clearly old hands at this entertainment game and have a great rapport with the audience, feeding them lines to respond to and enjoying the peekaboo ‘she’s behind you’ moments, before taking the tale out into the auditorium and allowing the children to get involved with parcel deliveries and meeting the characters. There’s a lot of action going on throughout, but Steve Tiplady’s precision direction ensures everything that has to happen does so without too many collisions! You might say it’s all well-timed…

The music (by Malara) is really effective – bouncy and bright, helping to define the atmospheres for individual scenes and bringing an energetic momentum to the story. And an audience rendition of the titular nursery rhyme is very well received across the board.

With silliness, slapstick and friendly audience interaction, this is a fun 50-minute performance that will have the children laughing out loud. And post-show, there’s an opportunity for the audience to step outside the theatre to meet their puppet friends face to face. What’s not to like there?

Performed by Mark Pitman & Iklooshar Malara
Directed by Steve Tiplady
Puppetry Directed by Liz Walker
Music by Iklooshar Malara
Devised & Designed by Garlic Theatre

Hickory Dickory Dock is aimed at ages 3-8 years and runs as part of the
Little Angel Children’s Puppet Festival until Sunday 24 August.