There’s a Bear on My Stage
Ross Collins’ There’s a Bear on My Chair turns ten this year, the book a firm favourite with families everywhere. The tenth birthday sees the picture book coming to life on stage too in a new production commissioned and produced by Fuel. Nicolette Jones joined a lively crowd at the Imagine Festival to watch the show for Books for Keeps.
The 900-seat Queen Elizabeth Hall on the Southbank in London was packed out with families on the day in February half-term that I saw the 40-minute adaption of Ross Collins’s picturebook There’s a Bear on My Chair, staged as part of the Imagine Festival (the show ran three times a day from 18th-23rd Feb). The show was aimed, said the publicity, at 2-7 year olds, and most of the children seemed to be toddlers and pre-schoolers, a difficult crowd to engage. And yet what noise the audience made was mostly pertinent response: ‘The mouse wants his chair back!’, ‘He’s in his underwear! [with delighted giggles].’
Designed and directed by Toby Olié, who spent six years as one of the puppet directors of War Horse, and whose previous work includes an adaption of Ross Collins’s Elephantom, the show involved four puppeteers dressed in the same light turquoise as the background of the set. For much of the time they had two creatures to manipulate: a grey mouse in a red-and-white patterned jersey and a big floppy polar bear, both 3D manifestations of Collins’ drawings.
The company is FUEL Theatre, funded by Arts Council England, Garrick Charitable Trust and the Royal Victoria Hall Foundation, and the story was in fact taken from two of Collins’s books: There’s a Bear on My Chair and its sequel There’s a Mouse in My House, both published by Nosy Crow.
The set was a chair, a red cushion and differently-coloured squares partly submerged at an angle. Props included a ladder, a box and a bed, as the mouse retaliated for the bear taking over his chair by invading the bear’s own home. There was also a very tall sandwich, a bath, and a big bunch of balloons. Unlike, say, stage adaptations of The Snowman, or The Tiger Who Came to Tea, there was very little added to the events in the picturebooks, except for sound and action implied by the existing images (and a few visual jokes, for instance about earwax). In its adherence to the original works, the show did something rather splendid: it modelled how to read books out loud. The rhyming text of the books appeared inscribed on the back of the set as the words were spoken, just as an adult reading aloud might point to them.
In the first book, the mouse is the narrator. The bear (or his puppeteer) made growly wordless noises with the tone of speech, a trick an adult reader might imitate. The production understood the importance of the visual, both to tell the story and for humorous effects, so that even pre-verbal infants had a sense of what was happening – just as images captivate very small children looking at a picturebook.
The adaptation made the most of Collins’s jokes, as for instance when the bear was on his phone and so paid no attention when the mouse jumped out of a box in his Y-fronts. A Taekwondo episode was entertainingly choreographed. There was the chance to pause for laughter, just as there is with a bedtime story.
There were also clever devices to express what we see in the pictures. A ‘nasty glare’ was a dotted line on tape extended from the mouse’s eye to
Fred Davis and Elisa de Grey with Bear in There’s a Bear on My Chair. Photo by Dan Tsantilis
the bear’s. A shift in scale followed the now-tiny bear through an icy landscape back to his home in an igloo. An overflowing bathtub made wet lines form down the set. What was added was the mouse’s Geordie accent (always an idea to do voices), and the tunes: including Brahms’s Lullaby, and a selection of soft rock. Adults reading this book might be inspired to sing – perhaps, for instance, Bright Eyes (Art Garfunkel), I Wanna Know What Love Is (Foreigner) or Total Eclipse of the Heart (Bonnie Tyler), all of which were used in the show.
Also a bonus were the allusions for adults to enjoy: the bear dresses briefly (in both book and show) in an Elvis outfit. There was an arms-out
Titanic pose and a Banksy reference. This is all in keeping with Collins’ own capacity to entertain his dual audience.
The books have a happy ending. As a crowd of other mice show up, the scene turns into a party, with flashing lights, and the bear decides ‘these mice are nice’. There was only one disappointment in the theatre for me. The publicity suggested the show might end with the audience joining in the dancing. Sadly none of the 900 of them did. And I was ready to rock.
This same show runs at The Egg, Theatre Royal Bath Thurs 27 Feb – Sun 2 March 2025
Nicolette Jones writes about children’s books for the Sunday Times and is the author of The Illustrators: Raymond Briggs (Thames & Hudson); The American Art Tapes: Voices of Twentieth Century Art (Tate Publishing) and Writes of Passage: Words to Read Before You Turn 13 (Nosy Crow).
There’s a Bear on My Chair by Ross Collins is published by Nosy Crow. All photos by Dan Tsantilis.
