TRAVERSE, EDINBURGHTHE Children’s International Theatre Festival has brought us a terrific range of miniature masterpieces in this year’s programme. Queen of Colours, from the Waidspeicher Puppet Theatre of Erfurt, Germany, and at the Trav
erse until today, is a case in point. It’s a modest show, with three performers - a pianist, a painter and a puppeteer - along with a lightbox, a few paints and a screen on which we can see an enlarged image of painter Eva Noell’s live brush-strokes.
It’s the story of the Little Queen, who wakes up in the morning, orders her court painter - with the help of the court pianist - to create a jolly little world for her, and then begins to experiment with colours; she learns that you can have too much of a good thing.
So the concept could hardly be simpler, yet the relationship between the tetchy, bossy little queen and her artists becomes a beautiful metaphor for the way people with power imagine they can shape the world to suit themselves, and for the relationship between child and parents, who make her world for her. In that sense, Noell’s motherly performance as the artist and Tobias Rank’s presence as the pianist who provides mood-music is a lovely portrait of parenthood - and puppeteer Paul Olbrich’s gruff little Queen is a masterpiece of comic characterisation, tiny, but perfectly formed.
