Octonauts

✭✭✭✩✩    Thrills spill

King’s Theatre: Sat 4 – Sun 5 April 2015

Thrills, spills and exotic undersea animals are all present as expected as the Octonauts take their audience on a Deep Sea Volcano Adventure to explore, rescue and protect.

With plenty of jolly songs and led from the front by live versions of six of the eight Octonauts – using a level of interaction which owes a debt of gratitude to pantomime rituals – this has all the makings of the perfect show. Indeed, greater attention to all the details would have delivered one.

Seven Octonauts: Dashi, Professor Inkling, Peso, Captain Barnacles, Kwazii, Shellington & Tweak

The way into the adventure, through a new Cadet Luke who wanders round the audience before the show, is nicely done. Captain Barnacles is free to address his theatre full of Octonaut Cadets, who salute back with the shout of: “Aye Aye Captain!”.

The Cadets even get to steer. First the Gup-X and then the Octopod itself, thanks to interactive screens which show them which way to go – and lean.

Once underway, the adventure will be familiar to fans of the CBeebies show, as the Octonauts set off to save a blob fish called Bob from the lip of an undersea volcano, deep in the midnight zone of the deepest ocean. Also familiar will be Bob’s two brothers. Also called Bob.

Technically this should easily pass muster. Big screens replicate the familiar, boldly-drawn undersea world. The two non-vertebrate Octonauts, octopus Professor Inkling and the vegimal Tunip are puppets who make small but important contributions to the show.

When the Octonauts go off into the dark of the undersea world in their gups to rescue the animals endangered by the soon-to-erupt volcano, an ultra-violet black-light show comes into play – intriguingly showing the different gups rescuing the animals on which their design and construction is based.

a sense of scale

Puppets are also used judiciously when the Octonauts don their deep-sea suits and leave the safety of the Octopod. It works well to give a sense of the scale of the world they are exploring and protecting. But, as the puppet versions of the Octonauts are true to the TV series rather than their live representations, it also highlights where the live show falls short in terms of the look of some of the characters.

And the versions as seen on CBeebies

The problem for the show’s makers is that these are cartoon versions of animals. For the likes of polar bear Captain Barnacles, Kwazii cat and the dog, Dashi, this is not too much of a difficulty. Peso the penguin, however, is pretty much unrecognisable from the TV version. He would work if you are new to the show, but aficionados will have a bit of difficulty coming to terms with his elongated body.

If the look of the characters is constrained by human physique and what can reasonably be done with a full body costume, the sound of the characters is a lot more in the control of writer and director Richard Lewis and his casting agent Alison Booth.

And sadly Lewis and Booth have either not chosen appropriately or not paid sufficient attention to what the voices should sound like.

Peso, played by Michael Lapham, could have stepped out of a Spike Milligan impression – fans of the Goons will recognise him as Little Jim going “He’s fallen in the water” when Ned Seagoon has done just that thing. Whereas Luke Lennox appears to have been using Groundskeeper Willie from the Simpsons as his template for the voice of Shellington.

Captain Barnacles needs a sense of gravitas, a big powerful voice which is both attractive and honest – without being too fierce. Ben Thornton just uses too much of his upper register to attract the authority of the original.

a scaredycat behind all his bravura

But it is in Kwazii that most is wrong. Paul Lawrence Thomas gets the joke that he is a scaredycat behind all his bravura, but to do so, plays him with an annoying little mince to his gait, and makes him speak as if he was ready to join Mr Humphries behind the counter in Are You Being Served.

Luke Lennox as Cadet, Dashi with Peso, Captain Barnacles, Tweak and Kwazii

Those paying close attention to the script will find the odd little annoying quirk. Such as when Tweek’s Giant Tortoise finder is dismissed as finding cats, not tortoises, (Kwazii is unwittingly sitting on a sleeping tortoise), there’s no resolution of the truth.

And when the Octopod is finally escaping from the midnight zone along a path of glowing starfish, instead of taking a perfect opportunity to let the audience drive it out of danger, the whole production finishes with a rush.

Young Octonauts fans will come away somewhat awestruck by their undersea adventure. It’s just that having put the building blocks in place, the show has an annoying tendency not to use them.

Running time 1 hour 20 minutes (including on interval)
King’s Theatre, 2 Leven Street EH3 9LQ
Saturday 4/Sunday 5 April 2015.
Company web page: http://octonautslive.co.uk/

ENDS

Tags: Ben Thornton, CBeebies, Children's Theatre, King's Theatre, Luke Lennox, Michael Lapham, Octonauts, Paul Lawrence Thomas, Review, Richard Lewis, Theatre