Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Owl at Home Theatr Iolo
Theatr Iolo
Genre: Children's Theatre
Venue: Gilded Balloon Teviot
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
An owl is at home. Awoken by his alarm clock, he gets up to go through his day dealing with making tea, seagulls delivering his milk, having a snack of a mouse, singing about his day, not wanting to go out, living his life at home, his good life, until winter arrives and it’s a bit of a struggle.
Review
Cardiff’s Theatr Iolo creates work relevant to children of all backgrounds. And here we have a simple entertaining piece of engagement which works for their targeted audience well. The early primary audience when I saw it were so engaged. That told me that this was a happy place.
This is a well-crafted piece of theatre which uses all of the trickery at its disposal. I like the structure of it from getting up in the morning then eventually coming towards the end of it, like the seasons with winter coming at the end.
Our owl, George Williams, is the only person on stage, and portrays the solitary creature perfectly.
Rina Vergano’s adaptation of the original stor by Arnold Lobel platforms the idea that people can cope with their own selves, and without layering the knowledge of an owl at the beginning it makes us hungry for more so that when the owl listens to the radio later you are ready for the information and the children are fully engaged in what is going on.
And so, their points of view trumps mine and when I the start had the mallet and the clock, I felt it had gone on a little long but director Lee Lyford’s skill is that this is a device to engage the children as they laugh at the antics of their guide the perhaps not so wise, wise old owl.
Sometimes us old fuddy-duddy reviewers need to take a step back, put their ego in a cupboard somewhere and just look at how wondrous children behave in front of live theatre.
This is 45 minutes long and the children stayed with it. My favourite was when you saw the owl fight with the duvet and it was nice to see somebody fight with a duvet rather than trying to fight to get the cover on.
There were connections to the adults in the audience which worked well but more importantly the children just loved the silliness of it all. The structure worked not because some old geezer up the back was trying to work out what was going on, but because the children in that environment understood better than us all.
The owl was plagued with such silliness and physicality that we couldn’t fail to be engaged in his antics.
What was also great was the set and the technology. And when I say technology, I don’t mean anything that was overwhelming, but the way in which the owl used the binoculars, the dynamo attached to the bike and its the dynamo managed to keep things going and the hatch.
This was theatre not needing to be over-intellectualised. But you have to acknowledge the high degree of skill and intelligence to deliver such a crafted piece. This was really clever. It was clever because it knew what it was, it knew its audience and it knew how to engage with young people, so that their eyes are open to the possibilities of imagination, creativity and the theatre, which Theatre Iola has brought to them. I should just get back in touch with that childlike self who just wants to smile and laugh and enjoy so I did.
