Pants-tastic!

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There are certain words that will always make children giggle. Most of them start with the letter P and "pants" is one of them – the mere mention of which signals that you’re on to a winner. So Big Wooden Horse’s latest project—adapted from the award-winning picture book Aliens Love Underpants by Claire Freedman and Ben Cort—looks set to be a big hit with families. Between them, this team have adapted or co-produced some of the most popular children’s books for stage—The Tiger Who Came To Tea, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and The Night Before Christmas—and this latest one looks like it could be just as big. 

The picture book is well known for its sing-a-long rhyming text and bright bold illustrations of funny and friendly looking aliens. So, how do you turn a book like that into a one-hour show? “For theatre you do need a beginning, a middle and an end – you need a story to make it into a theatrical event. Our show is centered on a boy called Timmy who wants to be a spaceman. Timmy notices that pants keep disappearing and he thinks something funny must be going on. Eventually these aliens appear and when they suck up some pants in their tractor beam, Timmy also gets accidentally sucked into space. The aliens take him to their planet where Timmy solves a century-old alien mystery and they are so grateful that they make him Pant King.”

How the aliens are played on stage was important to Bampton-Smith, as they needed them to be familiar for the young audience and as bright, bold and bonkers as they are in the book. “The aliens are puppets but they are controlled by actors who are in full view of the audience.” This style of puppet was used most recognisably in the internationally acclaimed adult show ‘Avenue Q’. “Seeing the expressions of the actors as well as the puppets really adds to the performance and is very much part of the fun.”

Even if it’s younger children that love the original book, the show has been designed to appeal to children up to age eight now that it has more of a story. Bampton-Smith believes that “the older ones will follow the narrative and the younger ones will pick up on the visuals, the puppets and the effects. It's a real family show with something for all ages."