The Wooden Child

The Wooden Child arose from my curiosity about the myth and images in our culture that portray men and children... What is it that we do and think as a culture that turns our male children into men and what is the cost and benefit to us all

There is an implicit sadness in the play about aspects of being male. There is a certain sense of solitude handed down from father to son - a fear of intimacy. And a sadness about the things children learn from their fathers - obsessions with the outer world for example, war and business. The play looks at the constructive rather than the destructive side of the quality.

The play is masculine but delicately so: it holds up the male psyche for recognition rather than aggressive celebration. It is absorbing and richly rewarding and requires concentration and intelligence from its audience. A challenging, warm and satisfying piece.

Its theme is the making of a male child into a man. The images of the play are mostly those of growth, development and caring: a small child measuring himself against the awesome and imposing figure of his father, a child's hobby horse which sprouts wings and Pegasus-like acquires the power of flight, and two wonderful prancing horses, one of which breathes smoke and fire and turns into a spitfire piloted by the one-time airman grandfather. The storyline is not always clear but at its best this is a gentle and affecting piece of visual theatre.

The stories are told with a minimum of language, focusing on the complex and suggestive symbolic images Handspan has made its own, which reach beyond narrative into an instant and deep psych recognition. This show has a quality of enthralling gentleness, an innocence which makes it an unusually moving experience. I remember in particular two scenes: one in which the puppet-child watches his father go to war and build a mock-father out of the bloodied shrapnel pieces he brings back as the only tokens of love he can give him; the other is when the carpenter puts together the beautiful toy he has made for his baby.

With a sense of enormous delicacy and a sincerity marked by doubt and pain, The Wooden Child suggests an alternative beyond the absent father so embedded in our culture as a mark of maleness: the possibility of a father giving his children an articulate love instead of inarticulate pain.

This is a dense and intriguing work: sometimes too dense. is Harper vision father as nurturer? Or is it father as sole nurturer? Does he even intend to imply the second question? Perhaps not, but he does. Ind the end The Wooden Child is disturbing, highly provocative, perhaps too obscure - but always visually astonishing.

The characters, whether human or puppet were merely representative of character and emotionally sterile. While many of the images in the play were initially stunning, repetition rendered them ineffectual. After the initial emotional response, the images became static and retained only their symbolic meaning which became tired.