A kick in the Widdershins

With Cannon Hill Park's finest arts venue now embroiled in the big renovation, it's going to be a while before Brum audiences have a chance to see Theatre of Widdershins shows.

The Langleys have seen two of their excellent productions at the mac, Rumpelstiltskin and The King's got Donkey Ears. With the third current show in the repertoire, Furry Tails, standing no chance of being there for some time now and not scheduled for Shrewsbury until July 22, we decided to grab the chance to make the trip to Stamford in Lincolnshire and the excellent Arts Centre right in the middle of the pedestrian-friendly and traffic-hostile town to catch it.

It was, as expected, brilliant stuff. Andy Lawrence makes all his puppets as well as manipulating them and he has a real knack of creating memorable characters. Here he plays around with the number three to present the stories of those triplet pigs, Goldilocks and those bears and the Billy Goats Gruff.

There is some wild invention in the telling of these old tales. Iggy the pig turns out to be a high wire expert, Goldilocks ends up with porridge doing the same job as botox and the troll does a Neil Armstrong with a club singer twist. There's another wickedly off-the-wall take on Daddy Bear, but I won't let on just in case you get a chance to see the show - all the dates are on the website and all three productions are highly recommended.

The company is based in Bedfordshire, but tours extensively and, with the sorry state of arts funding is more and more concentrating on village hall shows. Hard times are forging a rather special kind of community art at a very local level.

A feature of Widdershins productions is that the audience is invited to inspect the puppets after the show and that's when you can truly appreciate the detail that goes into the characters and the sheer skill and invention of their maker's craft.

The upcoming Widdershins show will be Rapunzel and the Tower of Doom and is highly anticipated by the Langley clan.

Incidentally, if you do get to Stamford some time, take the kids to the play park on Recreation Ground Road. As well as the usual stuff (including a marvellous see-saw holding up to six) leave the kids alone for a while and they'll find the best climbing tree in the Midlands, quite a squat thing (which makes it easy to get in to) with big shiny green leaves and it's quite near the official climbing frame. It should be on all tourist maps.