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Half the fun of going to the theatre is the appreciative dissection which happens afterwards but sometimes this innocent pleasure can lead to a disgruntled desire for a wholesale rewrite. This was where I ended after Pinocchio, which prompted all sorts of ruminations about the nature of children's theatre, the importance of story-telling, the place of audience participation and so on.

Carlo Lorenzini's picaresque tale, published in 1881, is organised in 36 chapters, each presenting a self-contained episode from the life of the wooden rascal. Tuckett's writer, Phil Porter, has inevitably condensed and altered the original to fit it into an hour and a half but in doing so has blurred the story line. Porter opts to fudge the birth of Pinocchio who is plucked fully formed out of a tree, rather than coming to life under the carpenter's hands, which could have made a good coup de théâtre. He has also invented unnecessary and not altogether funny set pieces such as the scene where the baddy Stromboli corrupts all the children (played by adults) with booze, gambling and a rather unconvincing strip-tease. At the end of this the children, for no apparent reason, are changed into donkeys (in the book it's because they won't study and ignorant children are donkeys) which are then to be processed into glue. One assumes they are saved, but I wasn't quite sure.

Pinocchio at first seems an odd tale to modern eyes and ears. The puppet boy has all the appropriate characteristics of young males: laziness, mendacity and ignorance (though he is can also be loving and kind). The message seems to be that if you don't behave properly you can't be a proper boy, so all the undesirable features have to be knocked out of him by attempting to make him resist the tempters and villains that he encounters. There's a hectoring quality to this insistence on going to school, behaving well, having backbone and not telling lies. This slightly dubious moral philosophy is presented by Porter without irony (as in the original). On second thought it sits well with our government's overweening concern with antisocial behaviour in young people. The moral voice in Pinocchio is that of the Blue Fairy but could be that of Mr Blair. What would one not have given to have seen a Prime Minister lookalike dressed in blue tutu riding a scooter, rather than the conventional fairy as played by Cathy Marston. An opportunity missed.
 

But that would then make it a pantomime and this production is not billed as such. It is a 'family show', which I suppose means no bad language or sex - though of course there is no embargo on violence. It's child-friendly credentials are boosted by six post-show discussions and five family workshops but how many children will really find it comprehensible and fully enjoyable? We are not going to know, but it was very significant that the greatest animation in the audience was when beach balls were thrown from the stage into the auditorium and batted around for a while and, at the end, when glitter was rained down on the spectators. Other efforts at getting audience participation were half-hearted. The show starts with most of the cast being summoned out of the auditorium, but this idea is not followed up; later there was an attempt to get the audience to sing along or at least clap to the music. This is a show that cries out for panto type audience involvement ('LOOK BEHIND YOU...' and so on), but no. The best way to involve the audience is to get them to laugh but, although the script is clever and witty (where audible), much of the wit is adult, little is laugh-inducing.

Why do grown-ups think that children think that foreign accents are funny? Used for comic effect in the theatre they are alienating rather than endearing. Why has so much energy and ingenuity gone into inventing a lingua franca for Stromboli when it is scarcely comprehensible by adults, let alone children? (Comprehension is not improved by over-amplification - all the performers are miked even though no audience member in the Linbury is more than spitting distance from the stage.)

The staging has good effects, especially a silken stormy sea with model boat to show Geppetto's ill-fated journey and shipwreck when in search of Pinocchio. There are also scenes that redefine bathos, notably a Land Of Toys which consists of six beach balls, suggesting that the production budget had overrun. Something that cannot be faulted however is the application, skill and enthusiasm of the cast who make the most of sometimes thin material. I reserve my criticism for the progenitors.

I wish I could feel more enthusiasm for this piece from someone who has given much enjoyment in the past and surely will again.