There is nowhere you cannot go with imagination as your transport and this creative Capital E National Theatre for Children production, enterprisingly directed by Kerryn Palmer, proves the point yet again. The journey from the basement of a natural science museum somewhere to dinosaur time and place is just the beginning. 

For when the cheerful and extra resourceful Ivy, with her extra capable cleaning trolley, undertakes to show the audience not only the dinosaurs in their own time, but then to save them from that meteorite which signalled their extinction, we are whisked about in time to consult Galileo about how to block the disaster and then to the moon just as Neil Armstrong is making his descent and back to Guy Fawkes as a last resort, to beg explosives to blast the meteor threat apart. 

All this is accomplished with panache, in spite of a challenging space, thanks to Alice Hill’s canny design (plenty of colourful surprises), sound and lighting contributions from Gareth Farr and Marcus McShane respectively and most of all to indefatigable energy from the writer/actor Jennifer Martin. She has the knack of establishing the impossible with complete airiness, aided in the time shifts by a succession of nifty cameos from Nick Dunbar.

The crowning moment comes appropriately at the end of an entertaining 55 minutes when the dinosaur egg, lifted from the first travel stop, hatches. The audience who saw the performance with me was delighted. So of course is Ivy, as she has just been fired for allowing such havoc (that was the explosion) in her basement. 

Accessible and imaginative, the production is a positive addition to children’s fare in the Christchurch Arts Festival. Thanks Capital E. (It plays again at NASDA Studio 1 on Thursday 6 at 10.30am and Friday at 1.15pm.)

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There’s something strange happening at the museum. A party of tourists has gone missing. They are discovered being an audience for the irrepressible Ivy. She’s the museum cleaner with a pommie accent who keeps her cleaning gear and various objects one suspects she oughtn’t to have, such as Sir Ed’s ice pick, in the cluttered basement.

She’s cleaner by day, clandestine palaeontologist by night. And when she gets into her magical cleaning trolley she breaks through light speed barriers, flips through time and space, and becomes the first human to land on the Moon where she decides to stop a meteorite from crashing into Earth and destroying all the dinosaurs. Using 17th century English gunpowder is her cunning plan. [More]

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Yesterday I wondered why we were importing our own stories from overseas instead of making them here. Perhaps I found the answer today. Perhaps everyone who might be making a Hairy Maclary show, and doing it brilliantly, is too busy making shows like Ivy, Saviour of the Dinosaur.

Perhaps we are too busy creating shows from scratch, shows with stories designed for the stage, to be trying to retell something that has already been brilliantly told on paper as a book and has no need of further adaptation; too busy proving that just because you’re telling a story for children who may not quite see through all the disguise, that doesn’t mean you have to make it stupid for it to be fun. You can have both without compromise.

Jennifer Martin’s Ivy is a dorky, bumbling museum cleaning lady by day, and a gutsy, yet oh-so-sweet, time-travelling palaeontologist by night, on a mission to stop the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs from wiping out the dinosaurs, and she must get more information from history to do so.

The entire aesthetic of the show is exquisite, from the inventive set and props to the costumes, the lighting that appears in such interesting places and the music, which almost has me tearfully sniffling as much as all those astronaut films do when Armstrong steps onto the moon. 

Ivy’s cleaning cart, which is secretly a time machine, is perhaps a nod to Terry Pratchett’s character Mrs Tachyon, the time-travelling bag-lady who carries time around in old rubbish bags in her shopping trolley. Ivy’s cleaning cart cannot only propel her through time and earthly space, but also into the atmosphere. 

This was a solo show in origin and remains pretty much a solo show, but Nick Dunbar pops onto the stage every now and then, almost launching into clowning but never quite going all the way, to provide a hilarious range of historical characters. All with their own witty gags, Shakespeare, Galileo, Neil Armstrong, the enamoured Guy Fawkes, Richard Pierce and even a fleeting Cleopatra all seem to be well acquainted with their old friend, Ivy.

Like a good Pixar movie, there is wide range of humour appealing to the very young, the slightly older, and the adult, and if some jokes go over one person’s head, or another person doesn’t laugh quite as loudly at a loud fart noise, it’s really okay. Although the show was advertised as being suitable for Years 3-9, I saw much younger children there being very entertained, some laughing their heads off, and sitting undistractedly through till the heart-breaking yet hopeful end when <spoiler? but it’s history!> Ivy is fired and we find dinosaurs did not all die out as some evolved into birds. </ends>

“This may look like a humble garden utensil,” says Ivy, and I hear a small voice in my vicinity cry, “No, a treasure axe!”  “But it is in fact an ice pick,” Ivy continues. 

Good children’s theatre, like good children’s literature and good children’s films, must have a universal appeal. It must be able to be go on being witnessed, read and viewed by any age group, without the parent feeling obliged to tolerate or put up with this for the sake of their children. Ivy, Saviour of the Dinosaur accomplishes this.

This is high quality, intelligent theatre for children or adults, with costumes and sets that are not simply designed to fool four year olds but to be beautiful and elegant as well. It is perfectly enjoyable and accessible for any age, and it’s super cheap (just $12 a ticket). I would pay to go and see this with no child in tow, and I would have a really good time too. 

If you are wondering what to take your school-aged child or your strange introverted pre-schooler to these holidays, the answer is this one. There’s even a craft session after the show for those keen to make a T-Rex puppet or a hatching dinosaur egg (cost is $2 per craft).

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Capital E (National Theatre for Children) knows just what its audience likes, as this fast-paced production demonstrates. 

Museum cleaning lady Ivy (Jennifer Martin) engages her pint-sized audience from her first appearance on stage, letting the kids know it’s okay to interact with her. She shows us her treasures and reveals to us her secret: she is a cleaner by day, palaeontologist by night. But what’s more, Ivy’s humble cleaning cart is also a time-travelling trolley, which quickly launches us all on an adventure through time and space, amid wafts of smoke and flashing lights. 

The kids love it. My eight year old thinks it’s hilarious, from the T Rex named Diane to the bare bottom accidentally mistaken for the moon by Galileo. With just the right amount of toilet humour (a flatulent Galileo again) and plenty of dinosaur facts and sound effects to keep the kids entertained along the way, Ivy encounters an amazing array of historical figures (all played by the dexterous Kenny King) on her mission to intercept an asteroid destined to hit earth and kill all the dinosaurs.

It’s kind of educational, though what the seven and eight-year-olds make of the fleeting appearances of the likes of Hitler and Cleopatra is doubtful. What works best, of course, are the longer encounters.

A whirling Galileo – along with a bucket and an apple – supplies the best description I’ve ever seen of how the sun, moon, and earth interact. “Houston, we have a problem,” takes on a new meaning when Ivy’s arrival on the moon coincides with Neil Armstrong’s. This is the most resonant scene for me: the music and movement are beautifully co-ordinated – and there are still laughs.

The spindly and goggly-eyed Ivy, making the most of her frame and her props, keeps us guessing right until the end whether her mission to save the dinosaurs will succeed or not. “Did we do it?” asks Ivy, and her audience.

Well, the answer to that may be yes and no, but does the play deliver what the kids like? Emphatically, yes. It’s just what the kids ordered. 

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Capital E National Theatre For Children’s Ivy – Saviour of the Dinosaur by Jennifer Martin is different [from the other children’s theatre on offer these holidays] but just as new and interesting. This is a fascinating piece of theatre, expertly performed by Martin with Nick Dunbar skilfully playing many of the characters Ivy meets on her adventures.

And what an adventure she has. During the day Ivy is a cleaning lady housed in the basement store room of the museum where there is a great array of historical artefacts, set out on Alice Hill’s wonderfully creative set.  But by night she is Ivy the palaeontologist on a quest to save the dinosaurs.

Her cleaning trolley creatively becomes her time traveller and off she goes back in time on her mission to the Cretaceous period, when a meteorite is about to wipe out the dinosaurs.

Ivy devises a plan to stop it, involving going to the moon where she meets up with Neil Armstrong stepping out for mankind, and back to the 1700’s to purloin some of the gun powder Guy Fawkes is using to blow up the British parliament.  On the way she meets lots of other historical characters.

While the show becomes a great history lesson, probably too advanced for many younger audience members, the special effects of flashing lights and bellowing smoke aided by Gareth Farr’s evocative music provide plenty of interest to watch if not to listen to, to make this another great piece of holiday entertainment.

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What a joy to see a brand new play for children that does not simply recycle some age-old folk tale. Ivy, of Ivy – Saviour of the Dinosaur, recycles history, paleontological history no less, with a quick whip through other historical milestones en route.

Jennifer Martin’s Ivy, a cleaner at the museum, was born in 2010, to deliver her Toi Whakaari 20 minute Go Solo piece, Ivylution. Now the show itself has evolved into a 45 minute play with a second actor and some superb design elements, all dynamically co-ordinated by director Kerryn Palmer.

Designer Alice Hill has created a very authentic looking basement with shelves of cleaning products and idiosyncratic artefacts which – like the cleaner’s trolley and costume – opens up to reveal hidden elements that reveal Ivy’s unbridled imagination.

Gareth Farr’s music and sound compositions and Marcus McShane’s lighting design also enrich our shared experience of Ivy’s fantastical quest down through the ages to the cretaceous period and back again, to save the dinosaur from extinction by somehow intercepting the meteorite on target to hit planet Earth around 65.5 million years ago.

Writer/performer Jennifer Martin has a ball with Ivy, in no way playing down to her young audience. People of all ages will tune in at whatever level suits them – my four-and-a-half year-old great nephew was as riveted as I was, and for different reasons – making this an ideal family show.

We soon discover we, in the darkened auditorium, are the lost tour group a security guard (Nick Dunbar) mentions on the intercom but we are not asked to participate in any way to help Ivy’s cause (nor in the belief that youngsters need to get up and move every now and then, in order to avoid restlessness).

If course it turns out that most of what we witness is happening in Ivy’s fertile imagination, with Dunbar’s security guard – who write’s Ivy off as a past her use-by date liability – adopting a range of historical roles abetted by the ‘found objects’ which are ingeniously utilised as costume and prop elements. Thus a domed plastic rubbish bin lid becomes Neil Armstrong’s moon-walk helmet, a floor-polishing mop denotes the wings of Richard Pearse’s plane, a vacuum cleaner hose becomes the asp that curtailed Cleopatra’s life, a ‘Caution, slippery when wet’ sign serves as a pointy hat for Guy Fawkes …

Dunbar also makes superbly-pitched cameo appearances as Galileo, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, King Harold and Adolf Hitler – all aided by clever design elements that cartoonishly capture the essence of character.

But the driving force is Ivy and Martin’s transformation from eccentric “cleaner by day” to gung-ho “palaeontologist by night” – she could be a close cousin of Indiana Jones – and the ride she takes us on is as thrilling as it is educational. It is a brilliant introduction to the concepts of history and prehistory for the young and an entertaining refresher for us oldies.
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I do have questions and quibbles concerning the historical and cultural elements, however. For some reason Ivy has a strong Yorkshire accent (so strong I thought her recurring line “An’ we’re ’ere” was “I’m Maria”). This doubtless had value in displaying her skills as a drama school graduand but in this context it becomes yet another lost opportunity to convince our kids that Kiwis too can be interesting, eccentric, imaginative, creative and heroic.

Ivy does re-enact Hilary’s conquest of Everest, up the shelving with his very ice pick; Richard Pearce does get a brief mention, and I assume the creature that hatches from an egg at the end is a moa (not made explicit, I don’t know why). Otherwise all the historical milestones are from the northern hemisphere, betraying the limitations of mid-20^th century education and the encyclopaedic record. Yes of course all that is part of our heritage too – on the evolutionary and scientific, if not on everyone’s cultural continuum – but our part of the world has existed too from prehistoric times and here was an opportunity to play with that too.

Was any thought given, I wonder, to relating Ivy in some way to Hawke’s Bay’s own famous fossicker for fossils, Joan Wiffen (see Valley of the Dragons: the story of New Zealand’s dinosaur woman, Auckland: Random Century, 1991). The security guard is a very Kiwi boke and the museum is presumably in New Zealand museum, so why not include an historical landmark from pre-colonised Aotearoa, and/or Captain Cook observing the Transit of Venus, and/or Hongi Hika’s trip to England to see King George IV, for example (in place of Cleopatra, King Harold and Adolf Hitler, perhaps)?

I am not suggesting no reference at all to the wider world. And I know we mark the legacy of Guy Fawkes every 5^th November and he is crucial to Ivy’s plan to blow up the meteorite before it strikes Earth and obliterates the dinosaur. But if Capital E National Theatre for Children doesn’t make the effort to stake our claims in global history and prehistory, who else in the world will?  

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