Ashlea Pyke from ‘Robot Song’, Photo courtesy of Arena Theatre Company
Presented by Harbourfront Centre as part of their JUNIOR festival, Australia’s Arena Theatre Company offers up an immensely entertaining and emotionally resonant piece of children’s theatre. Written and directed by Jolyon James, Robot Song packs an astonishing amount of depth and detail into its hour-long run time.
The stage is a glorious sea of clutter with milk crates, toys, random gadgets and craft materials strewn about haphazardly—resembling a child’s messy playroom. A large dumpster bin looms upstage. This is a space controlled by Juniper May (Ashlea Pyke), an eleven-year-old presenting her very own fancy theatre show so she can bring us into her world. She’s aided by her in-story parents, Dad (Phillip McInnis) and Mum (Bridget A’Beckett), who provide various on-stage audio-visual accompaniment and emotional support.
Pyke is especially endearing, bounding about the stage and interjecting with quirky asides that feel authentically childlike. Her dynamic with her father is the most developed as he actively contributes to her attempts to work through a recent upset. Passionate and creative yet socially awkward, she is given a cruel note—a petition signed by all her classmates—telling her that she is weird and that they don’t like her.
Robot Song doesn’t pull any punches in its depiction of youthful bullying. The final line of this note is a particularly awful ouchie, but through a series of songs, puppets, cool artifacts found in the dumpster and her dad’s active counselling, she is able to reframe her understanding of how she exists in the world.
The re-interpretation of this note, dramatized before us, is an exceptionally clever bit of storytelling. Though an imaginative de-coding process, she and her father—through the avatar of her favourite 80s cartoon robot character—unpack the hurtful intentions of the message to invent new, empowering meaning in it. Quite brilliantly, it makes clear the power we have: other people’s behaviour is out of our control, but we can contextualize and respond in our own way.
In addition to psychological depth, there is some fine spectacle going on here too. I was impressed with the convincing, well-integrated animations that interact with Pyke and a truly awesome reveal of her robot friend which emerges—full action-fantasy style—from the dumpster. I was genuinely teary-eyed, exhilarated and inspired by the end. Robot Song is a truly magical show, full of wit and emotional intelligence. And, uh, “The Poop Song” just killed me.