Winnie-the-Pooh

Review

There is much to enjoy and admire in this amiable adaptation of this most-beloved of children’s books presented as a Christmas family show by HumDrum.

The script draws heavily on the familiar words, and the company has created recognisable and convincing characters.

The costumes are particularly good; an imaginative blend of the human and the animal gives us a Tigger in a dynamic range of stripy T-shirts and socks, while Rabbit is appropriately fussy in a tweedy suit.

Pooh, on the other hand, is unashamedly all woolly yellow Bear.

James George gives this Bear of Very Little Brain just the right amount of endearing and befuddled pomposity, and he is well-supported by a nervously squeaky Piglet.

The whole cast caught the animals’ bemusement at the complexities of the grown-up world very well, but this had a down-side – it left the pace a little too slow, and some performers were too softly spoken.

More children in the audience would have helped to lift the energy levels and add a bit of crackle to the warmth of what is overall an engaging show.

Jacquie Penrose