THEATRE and music

IMAGINATE CHILDREN'S THEATRE FESTIVAL

TRAVERSE THEATRE

OLGA VOLT ****

The leading Scottish puppeteer Shona Reppe is in fine form at this year's Festival, lighting up the Lyceum Studio with Olga Volt The Electric Fairy, a beautifully colourful magic-realist family saga in miniature that tells the story of Olga's fabulous middle-European female forebears, complete with strands of circus and funfair, ice-dancing and silent cinema, storytelling and space adventure. "It's important to be glamorous at all times!" says Olga, demonstrating how a little showbiz magic can trump any tragedy, even the sadness of mortality itself. Joyce Mcmillan Scotsman May 2008

Macrobert Theatre Autumn 2007

Olga Volt lived up to Shona Reppe’s reputation for creation of highly imaginative work which takes its young audiences (and adults) on a magical and highly entertaining journey. Her collaboration with

Charlot Lemoine from Velo Theatre in France (who focus on the language of images and objects (with limited words)) provided a perfect match for her natural visual style and appears to have enabled her to take more risks in venturing into the world of the surreal and the abstract. 

Angela Hogg Scottish Arts Council June 2007

Herald

Olga Volt, The Electric Fairy

Mary Brennan Oct 26 2007

Paisley Arts Centre

The toaster is clearly unplugged. So, too, is the standard lamp. And the food-mixer. But when Olga Volt points her glowing wand in their direction - well! Faster than you can say Ohm's law, everything sparks into action: the mixer's beaters whisk the air, the lamp lights up and a slice of nicely browned toast pops into view.

Wow! The tots sitting close to the stage are rightly impressed - how does Olga do it? Her secret lies initially in Shona Reppe's wonderfully untrammelled imagination and then in Reppe's flair - here abetted by a resourceful technical manager, Tamlin Wiltshire - for finding practical ways of turning madcap make-believe into on-stage magic.

Olga's act - she's part of a travelling fairground - is lighting up nicely when suddenly there's black-out and sounds of biff-bang-wallop catastrophe. When Olga/Reppe emerges from under the vast skirts of her crinoline costume, she seizes the opportunity to tell us about her fascinating family tree, harking back to Lucia Volt, a falling star from the constellation Osram.

The huge crinoline morphs into a bell tent full of whimsical, cunningly detailed props which Reppe deftly builds into an ornate tree-sculpture while - in huskily cod-Russian accents - she tells us of past high-powered Volts, their live-wire husbands and various dazzling achievements.

There are droll, deadpan asides, mostly connected to Awful and Macabre Occurrences, and there are witty effects - Olga's energy-giving "juice", for instance, comes from a tap in the standard lamp, providing a fluorescently electric brew. Back projections, little puppets, photographs and, above all, a galaxy of thoughtfully deployed lightbulbs, reveal Olga's cosmic genealogy - "I'm a little bit of a star," says our Electric Fairy. Shona Reppe and her creative team ensure the adorable Olga certainly twinkles and shines.

“I wanted to write to someone at Imaginate to say how much we enjoyed Olga Volt the Electric fairy. ('Enjoyed' is such an understatement!) I took my 6 year old daughter Rosie, and her pal Hannah and her mum too, and we were absolutely enchanted, thrilled and mesmerised by the performance. We didn't want it to end, and wanted to go into Olga's little tent and play with all her gorgeous things and listen to more beautiful family stories. Isn't it fantastic when you feel a real buzz from theatre?” Morven Dean, Audience member at Imaginate Festival , Edinburgh 2008