The Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds’ ongoing love affair with Italian young peoples’ theatre company Teatro Kismet started some twenty years ago. It is easy to see why. The company’s precepts are stunningly simple. Artistic expression must be given free rein. The artistic palette must varied, incorporating speech, music, dance, acrobatics, and a highly visual design aesthetic. There must be no attempt to simplify where arguments are complex, no matter how old the audience. Therefore, there is no danger of patronizing them. The results are nearly always memorable pieces of sophisticated theatre made for young people but enjoyed but a much wider demographic.

This adaptation for the stage of Philip Pullman’s book is nothing short of sensational in both the literal and hyperbolic senses of the word. The piece is an allegory, a very beautiful and highly energetic contemplation of the difficulties and challenges encountered by an outsider when faced with trying both to understand and then to be assimilated into society. Serious stuff which is encountered in daily life as the process of growing up in this increasingly bizarre world takes place. Teresa Lodovico, the production’s creator and director, describes her approach to making theatre as finding her subject then to ‘chew it and feed from its essence, and when it gets inside my body and soul, that’s when I start creating the show.’

This total immersion in her chosen story delivers a production that holds a young audience’s rapt attention for over an hour and a half. No mean feat in itself. Pullman’s story of Roger, a boy who once was a rat, battling to understand his place and role in society offers an opportunity to explore the world in a series of episodes. Sometimes humorous, sometimes serious, often anarchic but always beautiful and dynamic, the play examines many of society’s institutions and finds them wanting. The local authority, the police force, the school system, the health service, the press, the law and the lawmakers are paraded in a variety of guises, ranging from the spooky to the farcically ridiculous. None is more apocalyptic than the vision of society as a circus complete with its autocratic ring master, domineering matriarch and genuinely frightening full-faced clowns doing the bidding of their rulers. No wonder Roger is driven to exclaim “Who am I? I don’t understand.”

Working for the first time with an exclusively British cast Lodovico has maintained the aesthetic that she has previously created with performers from other European nations in previous productions. The artistry is ubiquitous and remarkable. Fox Jackson-Keen’s central performance as Roger is marvellous. An innocent abroad who dances up a storm and maintains a beautiful wide-eyed, child-like smile throughout. The whole cast is musical and there is a variety of instrumentation on display. It is, perhaps T. J. Holmes, cellist and accordionist, who in fusing that musicianship with his performance as the Philosopher Royal best illustrates the Teatro Kismet aesthetic. The rest of the cast is uniformly good and their energy and commitment is remarkable.

The central design team of Vincent Longuemare and Luigi Spezzacatene deliver a spectacle worthy of the name. Where the costumes are extraordinary and colourful, the masks exaggerated and striking, it is the lighting that truly takes the breath away. Longuemare’s trademark use of deep and vibrant colour is allied to boldness which speaks volumes of about a philosophy that embraces lighting as an artform all by itself.

Productions of this quality are thin on the ground. Both Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds have been privileged to host it and our region has a third opportunity when the show comes to the Arts Theatre in Cambridge from 1st – 4th May. Do anything you can to get along to see it.

Take the production company’s name too literally and Les Enfants Terribles would be badly maligned. They are young, certainly, but they are not children and anything but terrible.

The Theatre Royal in Bury was filled almost to capacity as this meditation on war, inspired by the experiences of a First World War trench builder, insinuated its way onto the stage and into the consciousness. The truly talented company of five conjure up the mud-drowned world of the trenches and the ever-present spectre of wasteful and pointless death with a mixture of music, poetry, puppetry and design. It is a kind of theatre that many attempt but only few succeed in using effectively.

At an hour long there is a danger that the piece might be considered slight, but the richness of the material and its treatment avoids superficiality. In a world where entertainment and provocation come in many forms here is something that only theatre can do. It may not be flawless but it’s certainly effective.

Trench builder Bert and his junior companion Collins burrow under enemy lines when a mine explodes. This precipitates an hallucinogenic vision of the futility of war and the inevitable approach of Death. The narrative of the piece takes Bert on his final journey where, before being embraced by Death, he must face the three challenges that his own mortality, in the form of a magnificently grisly puppet, has set him.

There isn’t as much clarity about the composition of the challenges as there could have been and thus comprehension is occasionally difficult. The artistry is undeniable however. The whole piece is written in verse, non-rhyming, but verse nonetheless. Oliver Lansley, its author who has written more for TV than the stage, has an assured touch. The language is reminiscent of familiar war poetry of the period and that one forgets it is in verse after a short period of time is very much to the writer’s credit.

Most of the words are spoken by the actor playing Bert who convinces as the ex-coal miner whose work is as futile as the war that is being fought above ground. The lack of a programme makes it hard to identify his name. There is some beautiful contemporary music composed and sung by Alexander Wolfe. The puppetry is bold and effective and clearly inspired by the success of companies such as Handspring who were responsible for the magnificent creations for the production of Warhorse. The lighting is atmospheric and the set design a marvel of construction and invocation.

The challenges faced successfully, Bert may finally leave the macabre world of war, mud, blood and futility and pass into the light. There is a sentimental end to the piece that will not be to everyone’s taste but it brings, at least, everything to a marginally less desperate end than one suspects most soldiers in that ‘War to end all Wars’ were accorded.

The play now tours the country until early June and visits Peterborough, Cambridge, Norwich, Diss, Hertford and Bedford along the way. Full details of dates and venues may be found on the company’s website (www.lesenfantsterribles.co.uk)

Molière was a great playwright. He possessed a vicious wit tempered by a lightness of touch and mastery of dramatic construction. Hardeep Singh Kohli’s voice is contemporary and equally critical and sharp. When Jatinder Verma put them together, with Singh Kohli as adapter of Patricia Dreyfus’ translation, the artistic director of Tara Arts [this country’s leading Asian theatre company] knew exactly what he was doing. The result is a fusion of great, colourful fun and wicked contemporary resonance that both entertained and stimulated an audience of predominantly young people at the Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds.

Molière’s play is transported from seventeenth century Paris to the town of Nagpur in modern day India. The similarities of the two places, though separated by two distant epochs, are evident. Paris in Molière’s day was a city at the zenith of fashion. It was a city of unparalleled, beautiful architecture that focused itself on the titillating gossip and political intrigue of the time. India today is one of the planet’s fastest growing economies. Unlike so much of the rest of the world its trajectory is on the up, fuelled by the technological revolution and the internet and telecoms age. Across both civilisations acquisition, greed, financial speculation and judgments based on wealth are almost identical. Money, in both places, was and is the root of most of the evils of their respective societies.

Verma, also the director of the piece, has assembled a multi talented cast of actors and musicians who tell the story with enthusiasm, at a cracking pace and with the wry confidence of people who know what the effect of what they are doing has on their audiences. The ‘cautionary tale’ nature of the production produces much uncomfortable laughter of recognition of human foibles. In particular Antony Bunsee playing the role of Harjinder [transposed from Harpagon in the original] gives a master-class in how to play the central truth of a comic character whilst always acknowledging the presence and values of his audience.

The six members of the cast play ten roles between them with remarkable dexterity and a great sense of mischief. The music, in particular the singing of Sohini Alam, is itself a fusion of styles ranging from ancient folk melody to modern Bollywood-inspired songs. One jarring note is the fact that Alam sings all the songs and the characters are asked to mime. A nod to Bollywood perhaps but the transfer of the idiom to stage does it no favours.

It wouldn’t be a piece of work by Hardeep Singh Kohli without a nod to cooking and there are some wonderfully evocative and very funny lines about culinary expertise. There are also moments when the language soars into poetry and descends into farce. The play is all the better for the inclusion of both. “Young men” we learn “are like puddles but not as deep and twice as dirty.”

There are occasional difficulties in comprehension because of the amount of Hindi words that Singh Kohli has introduced in amongst the English spoken by the new Indian bourgeiosie. So much so in fact that the programme has a glossary to explain the meanings of words such as Kundalini and Tanga-Wallah. It makes the play slightly harder to understand than is good for it but gives it an exaggerated comic authenticity and after a few minutes the ear becomes attuned and, for the most part, the script is smart enough to explain in context.

This kind of work rarely makes its way beyond the M25 and other metropolitan  centres. The Theatre Royal must be commended for bringing it to the region.