The junkyards

The show is about two junkyard gnomes. They arrive on stage in a shopping cart full of weird stuff, and start by driving around and around a drying rack. They rummage through a rubbish bin and play with what they find. Then the day is over and they start brushing their teeth. They splash a lot of water on the audience, which the children in the auditorium thought was very funny. Then they attach themselves with hangers to the drying rack to sleep. When they wake up, there's a big red mailbox there. It starts driving around the stage, and all the letters spill out. They're for Santa, but the junkyard elves wish they were for them. So they cross out "Santa" and write "the junkyard elves" instead. The letters contain Christmas gift wishes, so they decide to be Santas this year. They make presents, but find it difficult to give them away. They fall out, but after a lot of back and forth they become friends again.

One of the actors was deaf and used sign language to communicate. The other could speak, but used some sign language as well. She would often say the same thing that the other one showed with her hands. This meant that both hearing and deaf people understood what was happening. Their emotions came through clearly in their body language, and both of them were very good at their roles.

There were only a couple of children watching the performance, but they laughed so much that it made the whole play more fun. We think it's very suitable for the target group (from 4 years old), as it's a simple and slightly exciting story with events that the children can relate to, for example when they argued about having the biggest toothbrush, that new and unknown things were scary, they were jealous of the one with the nicest gift and about becoming enemies and friends again. It was also good that they taught sign language to the audience, to get us more engaged.

I think this production will be a great success among children in the target group, with a lot of humor and related events to their everyday lives. Since we will judge based on our own opinions, we choose to give this play a 4 since it is very childish humor for us, and there is a bit of bickering between them.

Duration:60 min
Target group: from 4 years
Directed by: Ane Ass
Language: Sign language and Norwegian speech