Cloud Man

39658 original

A million miles from the brightly coloured, noisy spectacle of Sesame Street Live or Mother Africa, this quiet, lyrical play for young children takes place in a pale world of cotton wool clouds, beige-green mountains and tiny, chalk-white men. A beautiful piece of set design as well as an intriguing piece of storytelling, it had the children at the performance I saw wrapped with concentration and wonder throughout.

Our heroine is a scientist who has devoted her life to finding the elusive “cloud men” that live in the sky. Dressed stereotypically in large glasses and an anorak, but sympathetically portrayed in a subtle performance by Jen Edgar, she sets up camp at the top of “the cloudiest mountain in the world.” There, she sets about taking measurements with tiny instruments, sometimes finding a possession of the cloud man’s: a miniature sock, a little vest.

The tale evokes the slow-burn thrill of scientific discovery, whilst gently sending up its main character’s insistence on recording and cataloguing every small detail of this apparently magical phenomenon. The cloud man himself is tantalisingly absent for a good twenty minutes, making his eventual appearance—a series of personable puppets inside a large cotton-wool cloud, operated by Edgar herself—all the more magical.

The moral dilemma of the final section is interesting, but glossed over a little too quickly: children could have coped with a little more dramatic tension before the happy ending. Nevertheless, this pastel world will linger in their imaginations long after they’ve left the theatre.