How curious to be a child trying to make sense of adult behaviour, with its rules, routines and unfathomable absence of fun. Several of the shows on the opening weekend of the Edinburgh international children’s festival take this idea as a starting point, turning their attention away from the lives of the target audience and towards the world of adult eccentricity.
This can be a risk. In the almost wordless 9 to 5, the Belgian company Nevski Prospekt fields four office workers wearing identical grey suits as they loop through the rituals of dull bureaucratic life. A young Edinburgh audience with no experience of crowded commuter trains or complex filing systems (aren’t offices paperless these days?) struggles to know what is going on.
