A saxophone mimics the cry of the fox and the drums represent the sounds of a woodpecker looking for food. The highlight for me was Mary Erskine and Wil Dollard’s music. I enjoyed the references to land access and the right to roam, when Jay is shown how to enter “forbidden” areas of nature with swagger by Hare. A puppet of a barn owl is raised across the stage, silhouetted by the moon and creating a sense of magic. The set is used to great effect grey scarves are used to create waves of the sea. She finds a book of spells which takes her into a wild world where she is shown how to bin-dive by Fox (Alex Wingfield), the magic of a dandelion clock by Hare (Toby De Salis), takes part in a conker competition, refereed by Woodpecker (the mischievous Lucy Yates, whose drum solos are a highlight) and is shown the beauty of the sea by a grey seal. Jay, a schoolgirl (played beautifully by Miriam Nyarko), moves to a new area and becomes so overwhelmed on her first day of a new school she forgets her own name. The instruments, played by the cast throughout, are already on set when the audience arrives and remain so, deftly incorporated into scenes a cello becoming the trunk of an old oak. Like the books, this new musical celebrates the natural world and is beautiful in its simplicity a small cast, almost no costume changes and a magical set the light of a large moon presiding over a muted stage. The Lost Words and The Lost Spells by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris are a lament to children’s lost connections to nature and a reaction to the subsequent removal of words for nature being removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary.
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