Susan Harrison, Peyvand Sadeghian, Eleanor Wyld and Tom Kanji
(Picture: Ellie Kurttz)I’ve never liked Pinocchio – back in the days when children’s films had to include at least one scene specifically designed to scar children for life, Disney’s Pinocchio particularly excelled in this respect. Yes, I’m talking about the infamous sequence in the otherwise sweet story where Pinocchio is conned into going to ‘Pleasure Island’, a disturbing fairground where children can run wild, which turns out to be merely a front for a child trafficking ring which turns children into donkeys then sells them to salt mines.
Thankfully, for my sake as much as my children’s, there are no Cronenberg-esque donkey transformations or child trafficking in this Unicorn Theatre adaptation. Instead, we have a cat, a fairy, lots of wonderfully imaginative staging and ok, one nerve-racking bit involving a dogfish that did have my daughter diving under my arm.
