Picture two children whose father sits and tells them stories that ought to soothe them to sleep. Pan and Boone – the children who listen – are played by puppets handled by Joanne Harrison and Andrew Godbold and engagingly express a child's imagination and sense of wonder; his very anticipation of the life ahead of him. Combine this with an adult's actual experience and a coalescence of surreal characters emerge, hinting at corruption and impending disaster to slowly unsettle the boys' security. 
      Jeff Carey's play is staged by Theatre DapperTutto who take their name from Doctor Dapper tutto, a commedia dell'arte character and a magician who steals people's shadows and their souls. It's also Italian for 'everywhere' and so proves an apt symbol for the themes of this play, stitched up as it is out of dreams and aspirations and the drear-dawn of truths, all riding on the tales of every child's longed-for magician: the father. But here, the father struggles hard to make good appear out of his head. 
      Pan – the name is clearly from Peter, the boy who never grew up – is given tender life through Joanne Harrison; not only with her winsome voice but in sensitive hands which so well convey the attitudes of a younger brother's breathless trust. The pitifully brave Boone lies under the shadows of his family's secrets and has already departed the 'never-never land'. The play is a journey instead down the road of adult disenchantment, conjuring a series of scenes in which the excellent Michael Good, acting fully-sized alongside his puppet-children, is the larger-than-life purveyor of tales. 
      The American mid-west is the landscape of the writer's own boyhood and is the projected background (in props aplenty) on which Good's eagle/scoutmaster, his truckdriving bull and shrinking leprechaun play out the fantasies. Taking his sons with him, he is one minute comic, the next the stuff of his own nightmares and one is never quite sure what is childish waking or dreaming for the storytelling begins and ends with a sleep. Safe ground for the boys will be 'hot dogs and noodles'; and a more prosaic emblem of the light of day could not be imagined. Death is nevertheless in the air and it is not the adventure a child might hope for; only some terrible sum of life's disappointments. Indeed, the protection of a family is made meaningless when a father must say 'better split up – that way we won't all have to die!' Increasingly, these seem the desperate words of self-surrender and self-sacrifice. The shadow of the father's own father – who aspired to be a trapeze artist – seem likely to swallow him in a similar tragedy – and who knows how this might affect Pan and Boone? The high trapeze provides the final motif for this highly intriguing and paradoxical spotlight on filial expectation and on the joys and desires of the generation that goes on before you.
Crystal Lindsay