Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough
Rudyard Kipling’s famous bedtime tales are brought to life with a sink plunger, vacuum cleaner and, apparently, no actors
Rudyard Kipling dreamed up the fanciful origin myths of the Just So Stories to put his daughter to sleep. He must have quickly come to regret it. As anyone familiar with a young child’s bedtime routine will know, they had to be repeated ad infinitum with no variation allowed. Kipling wrote in the preface to the first edition: “You were not allowed to alter these by one single word. They had to be told just so.”
The tales of why the rhinoceros ended up with wrinkled skin, and how the camel got the hump have proved enduringly popular, though not all are in keeping with contemporary taste. The stories in which a prehistoric family gradually domesticate the wild beasts seem expressly designed to show that an Englishman’s cave was his castle. And some narratives are blatantly racist: you really don’t want to be reminded how Kipling suggested the leopard received his spots.
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