Short Report on the 2025 Edinburgh International Children’s Festival
Introduction
I was fortunate enough to have the time and resources to visit the 2025 Edinburgh International Children’s Festival, presented last month. I went on the advice of a colleague—partly to explore whether it might be the first step toward finding a producer for my young people’s books. Presented by Imaginate, the festival showcased a distinctive range of performances. Among the highlights were productions that, I felt, genuinely pushed the boundaries of children’s theatre.
I had just three days there, so this account won’t begin to do it full justice.
It’s been some years since I last produced work with children. I’ve often reflected that if Triangle Theatre, my Coventry-based company, were making work today with, by, and for young people, much of what we might want to create could be limited by what seems like an increasingly overprotective approach to children’s creative expression. However, if we’d been operating in Belgium, that might not be the case, at least, judging by two outstanding pieces I saw at the festival.
The First: Grown Ups by Compagnie Barbarie
(A company of five women)
This performance humorously deconstructed adult behaviour and theatrical conventions, blurring the lines between backstage antics and structured performance. It captured the chaotic energy of the theatre “get-in,” while cleverly commenting on backstage hierarchies just before the conventional ‘curtain up.’
As the performance unfolded, the backstage crew gradually morphed into onstage performers, drawing the audience into a meta-theatrical game that teased and challenged expectations. The central themes: risk, safety, and the fragility of live performance, emerged through a series of precarious situations involving trip hazards, leaks, and possible explosions. An overseer/producer intervened via intrusive phone calls, adding another layer of commentary. The entire piece became a witty and subversive critique of theatre’s very reason for being, as well as its relationship with bureaucracy, safety regulations, and the adult desire for control.
The young audience, perceptive and attuned, seemed to revel in this staged “chaos.” A sense of role reversal emerged: the adults behaved like children, throwing things around and making a dangerous mess; the children, as viewers, understood the unspoken rules and risks better than the performers. Learning achieved!
The blurred line between reality and performance kept the young audience riveted. As an adult witness, I found it a blissful celebration of dangerously safe chaos.
The Second: The Pale Baron by Kopergietery
The risk in this piece was political.
What especially interested me, given my background, was that the show was adapted from an illustrated book by author/musician Anna Vercammen, working with her collaborator Joeri Cnapelinckx.
Structured like a rock gig, the performance followed two musicians whose creative expression was forbidden under a repressive regime. In this dystopian world, residents, particularly foreigners, were only allowed to remain if they could prove their usefulness, which did not include making art.
The story became a work of resistance, with powerful themes of climate crisis, migration, and oppression intricately woven into the narrative. The performers used their relationship with the audience to explore how the masses could be controlled by authoritarian power, while simultaneously being complicit in its potential undoing.
This subtle navigation of state control versus collective resistance felt especially relevant for a teenage audience. The show invited them to think critically about freedom, identity, and social responsibility.
Both productions exemplified how risk-taking in children’s theatre can lead to bold, thought-provoking work that deeply resonates with young audiences. Each used absurdity and exaggeration to comment on tangible contemporary issues.
Reflections on Risk and Theatre: A Response to Lyn Gardner’s Keynote
These two shows followed the festival keynote given by theatre critic Lyn Gardner, held in the exquisite Scottish Storytelling Centre. Her address, or more aptly, provocation Death by Shark Bite or Falling Coconut? explored the notion of risk-taking in theatre.
Lyn opened by inviting us to reflect on risk in our personal lives, asking for anecdotes of the obstacles or leaps taken to attend the conference – small gestures, perhaps, in comparison to the deeper risks many in the room may have taken in choosing a career in theatre over more secure or lucrative paths. She wove in themes of bravery, failure and fear, referencing well-worn names in UK risk theatre like Improbable and Forced Entertainment, questioning whether early success in one’s career might paradoxically hinder further risk-taking. Success, she implied, can become something to defend, to replicate, which gradually dulls the edge of experimentation and courage.
She talked about survival, compromise and “repetitive skilful sameness.” I understood her explorations around integrity and personal investment that underlie real risk, not just for aesthetic change, but societal transformation. I particularly liked her references to children and how they learn through failure, without shame.
The keynote turned me inward. I found myself reflecting on my own pathway, one marked by several failures and, if I’m honest, elusive success (whatever that even means). I couldn’t help but notice how the tables had turned: having made public theatre risks over which Lyn herself once presided as critic, here I was now, critiquing her thoughts on risk.
What strikes me most is how impossible it is to universalise risk. Its meaning is contingent and shaped by the individual’s circumstances, culture, country, history, health, ambition. One person’s risk is another’s norm. It’s less about an objective scale than it is about thresholds, life stages, personal edges. Sometimes it’s a choice; sometimes it’s simply survival. The question becomes not “how big is the risk?” but “how much of myself do I stand to lose or remake in taking it?” Risk might be more about a place or milestone within a life, an edge, a threshold, a circumstance, a struggle. Ultimately it might entail a quiet acceptance that the risk is no longer possible to o’er leap. Think: the poor player strutting with ambition.
In 2009, I created and Lyn witnessed a piece of work around the executions of 7 women in history, called The Last Women. It was the biggest risk of my theatrical career, in scale, style, ambition, staging and concept. I wish Lyn had seen this piece with the risk-focussed sensitivities she is applying in 2025. Or let’s consider a radical risk-taking version of one of Dodie Smith’s novels in a Midlands repertory theatre she also witnessed.
After the critic departs, having pinned their verdict to the noticeboard, who remains to witness the aftermath? The audience’s shift, the conversations that follow, the impact on the artist’s practice? Does the critic return? Do they stay with the work long enough to see its deeper ripple effects?
I’ve followed Lyn’s writing for years. She has long been a champion of the small-scale, the innovative, the industrious. I remember with particular interest her response to the the performance and ancillary research materials for one of our projects in the late 1990s. But I admit to feeling a twinge of unease that she didn’t cut us as much slack then as she cuts for companies now.
Ah – so much to say. So much stirred up. Unfortunately, the keynote overran after a long and entirely appropriate response from Sue Giles, leaving no time for open discussion. So I offer this instead – my own belated contribution to the conversation Lyn invited.
Carran Waterfield June 2025