Arthur Pita: Ten Sorry Tales review – six feet under and surreally shipwrecked

Jerwood DanceHouse, IpswichPita’s adaptation of Mick Jackson’s splendigly lugubrious children’s book mixes mime, acting, song and dance to pleasingly twisted effectIf you like a happy ending, intone the glum cast of Arthur Pita’s Ten Sorry Tales, dutifully arrayed on wooden crates and kitted out in dismaying breeches and plimsolls, maybe this isn’t the show for you. Naturally, this warning is pure catnip for the audience. For the show, based on Mick Jackson’s splendidly lugubrious book of the same name, springs from the time-honoured tradition of children’s stories fuelled by the morbid and the maudlin; we are already eagerly anticipating the worst.It’s quite a task to adapt 10 separate stories into a single stage show, but Pita mostly manages very well, peeling them back to a few bare essentials, stitching them together with music-hall interludes – desperately upbeat melanges of pat-a-cakes, pratfalls, sand-dances and shimmies – clothing them in wilfully am-dram outfits, and looping the story of the boy who fell asleep through the evening like a melancholy refrain, each return marking the snoring passage of one more unwoken decade. Continue reading…
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