The Very Hungry Caterpillar Show – York Theatre Royal

Stories: Eric Carle

Creator: Jonathan Rockefeller

The advertising promises four timeless stories, but the show is named after only one of them. When the final one, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, starts, the audience reaction tells you why. This is certainly “the star of the show”, to quote the publicity material again.

The show relies heavily on the beauty, grace and humour of the 75 puppets. The four white-clad manipulators are ingenious and efficient, but there’s no sense of personality in them. Instead, when we start off with the question and answer of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, after the lumbering bear, we can admire the colourful design of the red bird – and so on, through all the colours.

When it came to the caterpillar, breaking from his egg and devouring everything out before him (here teaching the colours has given way to a counting game), then, after a brief spell as a chrysalis, bursting out as the most colourful butterfly you can imagine, the children in the audience (which is to say, the vast majority) were entranced. The caterpillar, pop-eyed and wiggling his bright green body, then transformed into a glorious butterfly, was undoubtedly what they had come to see. A word, too, for the puppeteers who “flew” the butterfly with great elegance.

In between 10 Little Rubber Ducks go all over the world and encounter creatures of all kinds before one of them is adopted by – a real duck! This is succeeded by a multi-coloured Very Busy Spider spinning a web and trapping (what else?) a fly. Both of these – especially the duck! – are full of charm.

Eric Carle’s original designs are delightfully captured in the astonishing range of puppets given life (walking, running, flying, swimming) by the hard-working puppeteers. Clever use is made of the uneven blocks, covered in circles of different colours before the start, which open up various doors of assorted sizes to disgorge puppets. It’s a charmingly colourful show, with everything carefully enunciated by the puppeteers for the benefit of the little ones, but without that involving air of spontaneity of the best children’s shows.

Touring the UK.