I Believe in Unicorns at Lighthouse Poole

My kids all love the theatre and back in January, Eliza entered a competition to win tickets to see ‘I Believe in Unicorns’ at Lighthouse Poole.

She won four tickets to see the show by telling them the perfect name for a unicorn; Violet Snowy – so named because the unicorn has violet-coloured eyes and a snowy white mane and tail.

We decided that it should be a girls only affair and we took along her friend Olivia and her Mum.

The show was put on by Wizard Presents Theatre Company who are touring the country with the show and the girls took a couple of books with them which would later be used as part of the set.

The stage was set with huge piles of books, a couple of rickety ladders and ropes and ribbons that hung down at the back and my first mission was to get a picture of Eliza in front of the stage for her extreme reading challenge for school.

Normally pictures are frowned upon in theatres, but just at the right moment, Danyah Miller, our storyteller appeared. She happily posed for a couple of pictures with Eliza before heading into the audience to chat to each and every child that had come along to watch – and some of their parents too.

I Believe in Unicorns brings best-selling children’s author Michael Morpurgo’s treasured story to life and is a tale that showcases the power of books, and the bravery of a young boy called Tomas.

The story begins as we were introduced to young Tomas. Tomas hates reading and school and would rather run free on the hills near his home, but his world is turned on its head the day he listens to the Unicorn Lady telling stories in his local library.

Gradually the set starts to come to life and the books that are piled high on the stage release the magic captured within their covers. The storyteller opens up one book to reveal a delicate model of a house, with lights glistening in the windows, she opens another to reveal a ladder reaching to the stars, pours real milk from the pages of another and at one point even reveals a box of chocolates, much to the girl’s delight.

The show is all about the storytelling, although there is a clever little projector hidden in a book which is used a couple of times in the set to make a nightingale fly on a parasol and to make the books look like they are on fire. Mostly though, everything is found hidden in the books and our favourite part was definitely finding a book within a book, within a book, within a book and so on (the last one was teeny tiny).

If you have not read the book, it is a really beautiful story all about the power of reading and how it can inspire people and help them deal with everything going on in the world around them. Tomas’ love of books, becomes instrumental in saving his burning library when his village is devastated by war and that is when our own books that we brought with us came into play. These books were passed from the back of the auditorium, through the audience and onto the stage as if we were saving them from a real fire.

At the end of the show, we then swapped our books for another to take away and keep!

We all came away buzzing from the show and cannot wait for the next one they bring to the theatre.

The I Believe in Unicorns Tour is running until the end of March 2018.