Each time I see a musical production at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury, I am astonished by the fully professional quality and the ingenuity employed.  So I came to Michael Morpurgo’s Pinocchio with high expectations and they were more than fully realised with this play for all ages with songs and brilliant puppets.  

Pinocchio (Jerome Yates) is carved out of cherrywood by Gepetto (Christopher Bianchi) and so logically we start with a cherry pip from which grows a cherry tree with pink blossom swirled on clear umbrellas.  Cherries grow and one cherry is eaten by a boar resulting in the children’s best loved joke, a poo.  The cherry stone in the poo plants itself and a new tree grows providing wood for Geppetto.

There are many pieces of wood, some for chair legs or the oft repeated tall table lamps, his wife has too many of.  A thicker wooden log inspires Geppetto to carve a boy, a son for his patient wife Signora Geppetto (Lottie Latham). The resulting boy has to work out how to use his limbs but his skin has the marks of wood knots and lines. “What will he be called?” asks his mother.  His eyes are made of pinewood, so “Pini” and Italian for eyes, “Occhi”, hence Pinocchio.