The Leap
Draíocht, Blanchardstown
★★★★☆
With shimmering glass props, clever puppetry and chaotic magic, The Leap is a contemplative and cathartic new show for children ages eight and upwards and their grown-up companions.
Written by Gavin Kostick and directed by Veronica Coburn, The Leap is Fishamble’s first production made specially for young audiences. It’s a gently provocative, extravagantly imaginative dive into the emotional world of a preteen.
Space and time are warped and creatively used. Dad, played with perfect comic calibration by Emmet Kirwan, sits to the left of the stage, reading a newspaper, before the play begins. It’s a lovely piece of countercasting for a performer so closely associated with the punkish shapes of Thisispopbaby and Dublin Oldschool.
The pounding heart of the drama is Penny Morris’s Wendy, who is worn down by life in a poky apartment, by overworked, absent parents and by the sheer weight of schoolbags and existence. After she leaps from a piano and smashes her mam’s favourite glass table – an accident, she insists – the play becomes a detailed account of tangled, often incomprehensible emotions.
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“For victory”, she cries during the fateful act while pausing to consider that “spite was in my heart ... I think there was also sadness in my heart.”
Wendy then finds herself following her father through a trapdoor and into another world. It’s here the show divides into strata: an 11-year-old’s mental health, mythological beasts, and coming-of-age adventure. What follows suggests something more than the coffee table has cracked.
With the broken shards tucked into her backpack, Wendy and her dad enter a strange and ancient realm where surrealism rules and talking animals gently coax her to confront the sadness she has been holding in.
The simple, distilled design leans into Suzie Cummins’s lighting and beautiful handcrafted props to conjure a world of wonder. The playful puppet design and fabrication by Maeve Clancy and Ger Clancy bring a salmon, a hawk and a mischievous French fox to life with elegance and humour. These ageing animals, old pals of Dad, add a melancholy sense of mortality and baton-passing.
While the pace is measured and the storytelling gentle, there are welcome bursts of theatrical spectacle – especially when the hawk appears, carried aloft by Shauna Harris and Mary-Lou McCarthy’s tea-drinking goddesses – that spark genuine awe.
Morris plays Wendy with restless energy and real vulnerability. A recent graduate of the Lir Academy, she brings authenticity and verve to a complex role, capturing the inner turmoil of a child trying to make sense of a messy world.
Coburn, a long-time champion of thoughtful, participatory theatre, trusts her young audience to sit with difficult feelings. For all the clever stagecraft, this is not a show designed to dazzle nonstop but one that offers space for reflection, particularly for smaller people navigating big emotions.
The Leap was at Draíocht as part of Dublin Theatre Festival
