I sincerely doubt a cardboard version would be commissioned if starting from scratch, but it looks great: pure Klassen, with the puppets’ extremely limited mobility perfectly replicating the static nature of his drawings. The trilogy immediately solves the runtime issue: the revamped show – performed with a perfect mischievous glint by puppeteers Imogen Khan and Simon Lyshon – now stretches to a walloping 35 minutes. ‘This Is Not My Hat’ and ‘We Found a Hat’ followed and now here’s a live version of all three. This stage version of the three books started life as a lockdown project for designer Sam Wilde and director Ian Nicholson, who adapted ‘I Want My Hat Back’ into a short digital film using cardboard puppets made from recycled materials that exactly copied the look of Klassen’s book. The basic problem is that a literal stage adaptation of ‘I Want My Hat Back’ would only be about ten minutes long, and it’s difficult to see how you can convey Klassen’s distinctive visual style with human actors.īut that was before there was a trilogy, and – crucially – before the pandemic. The same qualities have also made the books tricky to adapt: the National did a sort of maximalist fantasia on ‘I Want My Hat Back’ a few years ago that was a lot of fun but didn’t especially resemble the source material beyond the key plot beats. Followed by ‘This Is Not My Hat’ – in which a small fish soliloquises to the reader about how he’s definitely going to get away with stealing a big fish’s bowler hat – and ‘We Found a Hat’ – in which two tortoise pals must decide what to do with a sombrero – the three books contain no shared characters or plot, but are linked by Klassen’s gloriously deadpan, almost woodcut-like drawings, sparse dialogue and bracingly morally ambiguous humour. Those are pretty much the main themes of Jon Klassen’s wonderous trilogy of picture books that kicked off in 2011 with the seminal ‘I Want My Hat Back’, in which a dopey bear wanders the forest looking for his missing red party hat, eventually clocking that it has been nicked by a rabbit, which it’s then very strongly implied that the bear goes on to kill and eat.
0 kommentar(er)
