There is no greater joy in childhood than having a bedtime story read aloud to you – and no greater evil in parenthood than realising that your child requires one at the exact moment “Line of Duty” airs.
The titling of Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 collection of origin stories suggests a keen awareness of this frustration on the author’s part, its sobriquet a testament to his daughter Josephine’s insistence that the tales be delivered “just so” in order for her to drift off to sleep.
One wonders then how she would’ve responded had she seen Stiles & Drewe’s remix of those stories in “Just So”, a musical originally debuted at The Watermill Theatre in 1984 before going on to be performed around the UK and America, now returning to its birthplace with an all-new cast and an outdoor production in the theatre’s gardens.
Unlike the source material (a series of unconnected stories), “Just So” situates each tale within the greater framework of “The Crab That Played With The Sea” and “How The Elephant Got Its Trunk”.
The Eldest Magician (Nathanael Campbell) creates the animals, but – alarmed by their uniformity – bids them go out into the world to find their unique individuality and learn how to play well together. Unfortunately Pau Amma the crab (voiced by Alexander Bean) refuses, growing to enormous proportions and flooding the land when he takes to the sea each day in search of food. It falls to the inquisitive Elephant’s Child (Eleanor Kane) and the Kolokolo Bird (Emma Lucia) to find Pau Amma in the Limpopo River and convince him to play nicely with everyone else.
Along the way, they meet a wide variety of other animals and people (played by a consistently fantastic cast), with dedicated musical numbers adapting Kipling’s associated stories for the audience.
It’s a brilliant device – unlike, say, “Cats” which told a series of stories without any overarching narrative to provide a sense of direction and bind them together, this approach feels far more engaging and allows each animal to pop up again at later points in the story. Which is great – the actors do such a brilliant job of capturing the animals’ unique moves and behaviour that it’d be shame only to see them once.
Credit is also due to the costume maker and choreographer, who avoid putting the actors in full “animal” costumes in favour of focusing on specific movements and costume accents that instead capture the essence of each creature. That the music is played by the actors supports this approach wonderfully – each actor sporting an instrument that seems likes a natural fit for their animal of choice.
It’s a wise move given the 2hr runtime and the fact that the bulk of the narrative is contained in lyrically dense and relatively lengthy songs – if the actors had been buried beneath elaborate full costumes which limited their movements and obscured their faces, it might perhaps be difficult to understand and remain engaged in the story.
But by performing uninhibited (everyone on stage is clearly having an absolute blast), the story literally leaps from the page of the Eldest Magician’s story book onto the stage, and its central themes – the important of diversity, community and collaboration – are able to shine.
Would Josephine Kipling have liked it though, in an age where bedtime stories have given way to Disney+ and attention spans may not have been what they once were?
Well, I’m pretty sure she would’ve loved it. If you imagine what “Just So Stories” would’ve looked like had Pixar adapted it into a musical, you’d pretty much have “Just So” – something that’s fun for adults and anyone with an interest in musicals and the natural world.
“Just So” (directed by Abigail Pickard Price) runs from the 30th July to the 4th September, with tickets available from https://www.watermill.org.uk/just_so_the_musical.
