Found in Translation Theatre Company present a lovely, heart-warming production around a difficult theme of loss.
James lives as a knight in an imaginary medieval world within his bedroom, which is his royal castle. His jester Bard, is actually his friend Sophie who tries to support James by playing along. They play games, dance, and spend the time in James’ fantasy world. James, yearns for this mother, Queen Laura to return and he keeps some of her belongings and draws her pictures for her return. This is James’ way of avoiding the reality of the death of his mother. His father, Dave, while also grieving, is concerned about this behaviour and tries to help by trying to be realistic. It doesn’t work, however with advice of Sophie, he becomes King Dave to connect with James and together they have imaginary journeys and slowly both are able to deal with their loss.
From the moment we entered the Studio Sir James and Bard were welcoming the audience as the lords, ladies and peasants of the realm, which set the mood for audience participation and made everyone feel relaxed and part of the story. This continued throughout the play, with a couple of willing participants joining in with some of the games. There was plenty of comedy and of course the jester was clowning around entertaining everyone, there was dancing, singing and plenty of smiles.
The cast were fabulous, Megan Risley’s (Sophie) facial expressions were superb and her physicality of playing the jester was captivating. Tommy Campe (James) was both delightful and charming and was able to characterise the pain James was feeling. David Sayers (King Dave) was an excellent father character, almost not acting as it was so realistic.
Even though the subject of the story is dealing with loss, this play written by James (Tommy Campe) is warm hearted, joyful, emotional and coping with death is delicately portrayed in a positive way, by keeping our memories alive and honouring the people we have loved and lost.
An exceptionally enjoyable performance.
This review first appeared on GrapevineLIVE