Rarely has BATS featured such a wondrous set as this childhood-littered underground burrow nestled within the root system of a maple tree, designed by Dannii Kellett. Big ups to BATS for allowing it to happen by giving Knot Theatre’s BURROWERS or The Secret Society of Notable Nuisances sole occupancy of their Stage space for the season.

The message from the creators, in their tiny burrow-shaped programme, includes: “this story was inspired by a shared fondness of children’s books, how they shape our imaginations and even follow us into adulthood by popping up with a wave of nostalgic comfort.”

A major value of this play – co-written by Felix Crossley-Pritchard (director) and Georgia Kellett (producer) – is the slow reveal of answers to the questions it poses. While I will do my best to be circumspect and avoid major spoilers, I can’t really review it without giving some of the game away – so if you are planning to go, you may prefer to read the rest after you’ve seen it.

The questions Burrowers sets out to address include: What happens to soft animal toys when the child who owned and played with them grows up and leaves home? And if the child shared a private play space with them, out of adult sight and mind, who might finally get around to tidying it up 20 years later?

Three abandoned animal toys have made a semblance of life for themselves amid the detritus left by their owner, William, who has long since grown up and left home. Reality and fantasy are blended in the premise that his preferred play space was in this burrow below a maple tree, accessed by a long wooden ladder that’s marked with his heights at progressive ages.

Although the beautifully-made toys are mounted on single rods, they are not articulated puppets as such (like, for example, the chicken in Still Life with Chickens). Because the way they are animated is limited, I often find myself more drawn to the actors who move them about, voice them and manifest their characters.

Kit Marsh plays the Cat, narrating and participating in the chaptered story in what I take to be a Welsh accent. Cat has a better handle on human vocabulary than the bumbling Badger, played by Maea Shepherd, whose accent suggests she was a gift from Greater Manchester. Devon Johnston’s Rabbit is very Kiwi, opiniated and stroppy. Their dialogue is whimsical and amusing once we have tuned into their accents – and when the musical soundtrack doesn’t obscure key syllables.

They know it is spring because the whirly-birds (maple seeds) are falling but choose to stay confined in the burrow because the roaring cars out on the road are known to have an appetite for Burrowers. The outside world comes to them in the human form of Annie Ruth’s red-booted Dot who, in a spring-cleaning mood, descends the ladder to deal with this long-neglected haven. (Is Dot Master William’s mother or is she an aunt, the home help or a neighbour? We may have missed something.)

Being in different realms of existence, the toy animals and Dot don’t interact. While the toys are aware of her, Dot has no conscious connection with them but her actions have to be synchronised with theirs. This is an acting challenge Ruth meets with alacrity, as she plays with other toys, dips into William’s old books, discovers original stories and thoughts written by William and confronts the dilemma of what do with all his stuff.

The relationship the animal toys had with their master and nature of his writings, read aloud by Dot, make William such a key character in the story that I find myself wanting to know more about the circumstances of his childhood, where he has gone and what he is doing now. The toys would want to know and I suppose their inability to ask Dot to tell them is the wavelength we are being asked to accept.

What Dot is going to do with this place (where is this tree in relation to the family home?) is obviously of great concern to Cat, Badger and Rabbit who, in reality, are much smaller toys that have been buried in a large trunk amid papers and boxes. It turns out there are plans, literal plans, that Dot discovers and conjures with …

BURROWERS or The Secret Society of Notable Nuisances is a intriguing play that transports us back to the perceptions of childhood with a gentle but persistent hint of the adult realities that may consign them to the tip.

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