Lyn Gardner 

Very Yellow

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If you are feeling a touch of the blues, then Yolande Snaith's whimsical theatre-dance piece for the under-sevens will soon have you in the pink. Set in a buttercup kingdom in a palace where everything is yellow, this quirky show offers all shades of music and dance styles and free entrance to a surreal world that is like a mad nursery rhyme, or Alice in Wonderland with a coating of custard.

On an ordinary pale-lemon morning in the buttercup kingdom, a yellow queen is brushing her dandelion dog when a man in the PVC frock coat announces with complete certainty: "Today will be another very yellow day." The queen immediately bursts into tears. But she soon gets over her jaundiced view of yellow with a little help from a bowl of custard, her friends, and the other colours on the palette, from ruby red to peacock blue.

The younger the audience for this show, the better. From an adult point of view, the anything-can-happen world depicted makes about as much sense as Edward Lear, Spike Milligan and Lewis Carroll rolled into one. For a TV generation brought up to believe that the hallucinogenic green pastures, outsize rabbits, plastic flowers and baby-face sun of Tellytubbyland are perfectly normal, it probably has an almost Aristotelian logic. It certainly has a sense of fun, and encourages the kind of imaginative leaps that in a blink of an eye allow cubes to transform into a horse or a boat.

This is a brave piece that not only seeks to engage its audience with the expressive and emotional language of the body, but also refuses to get hung up on narrative, working entirely in the realm of the imagination, feelings, signs and symbols.

At the Chichester Festival Theatre (01243 781312) on Friday and Saturday, then touring to Lewes, Norwich, Hornchurch, Crawley, Frome and London.

 

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