Writer Ross Willis has a terrific feel for words, their sounds, their percussive qualities. In Wonder Boy, he fixes our focus on the power of language by presenting as the hero of his story 12-year-old Sonny (Raphel Famotibe), who stammers so much that he avoids talking. Instead, he draws, for his own eyes only, cartoon stories featuring Captain Chatter (Ramesh Meyyappan), whose amazing power is… speech. Following a classic triumph over adversity story arc (similar to that used in the film The King’s Speech), Sonny discovers he must face the challenge of delivering lines in public when the headteacher insists he perform in his school’s production of Hamlet.
The staging shifts seamlessly between cartoon fantasy, reality and Sonny’s memories of his mother, thanks in part to Tom Newell’s videos and captions, incorporating the entire text into projections.
