Mr. Bo

The very youngest children, those as little as 4 or 5 years old, are the target audience for this wordless show by one of the most successful family theatre companies on stages and at festivals dedicated to theatre for all audiences. This time, the creators of top-quality family shows use humour to confront children with a reality they are sure to encounter in their lives: despotic power. They broach the subject in an exaggeratedly naive way, with a clownish simplicity that they fill with poetic images. They do this through the story of a man, Mr Bo, and his three servants. The servants have spent their lives doing their master’s bidding and don’t know how to do anything else... or maybe they do. When they have time, they pretend to be masters themselves, imagining what it must be like to have power. Maybe when Mr Bo was little they would have refused to be at his beck and call... but now it’s too late. Or is it? There’s always a second chance to say no...

This is the latest creation from Marie de Jongh, a Basque company founded in 2008 to tell stories, mostly without text, and which defines itself as a company of ‘children’s theatre for adults and adult theatre for children’. Winner of the 2018 National Prize for Performing Arts for Children and Young People, awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, the company made its debut at the Grec in 2016 with Amour (which won a Max Award the following year), returned in 2019 with Estrella and terrified us in 2020 with a show with a spell for a name: Ikimilikiliklik.

A Marie de Jongh production.

Show recommended for children over the age of 4.