Edinburgh Fringe 2026
The Small Bright Things
Flat 4 Collective / PBH's Free Fringe
Genre: Children's Theatre, Puppetry, Shadow Puppets, Visual Art
Venue: Central Youth Hostel
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
The Small Bright Things is an immersive theatre performance for 0–3s, a sensory storytelling show that invites you and your baby to join mushroom keepers in exploring the woods.
Review
Entering the world of The Small Bright Things, we are presented with a large hand-crafted playmat. Created with mostly natural fabrics, you can see textures of the forest floor like moss, grass, logs and little mushrooms. There are creatures half hidden within this floor-level landscape we will meet throughout this piece of interactive theatre. Two ‘mushroom keepers’ usher us silently to sit around the mat and keep our babies behind the rope line.
Soft lighting and a calm musical soundscape complement this scene. Once we are settled, the performers gently light the space with LED lights around the playmat and mushroom lamps that are placed tenderly within baby’s reach. We then meet a series of creatures that greet and gently interact with the babies – including caterpillars and fairies. Puppetry, shadow-work and music guide us through a calm half hour. At the end, 15 minutes are given for the babies and parents to crawl into the forest floor and interact with the space.
This performance is beautifully gentle and calming. The use of light creates mesmerising moments for the young audience – a shadow bird flying across the roof caught the eyes of many wee ones. Sound was used effectively – the singing bowls and bells, along with the silence of the mushroom keepers, drew the children’s attention into the performance. The felt fairy puppets were sweetly made and their interaction with the children – including stroking their faces with their little felt hands – had a real spark of magic to it. These thoughtfully made puppets, and natural fibre elements of the playmat, were really successful. However, they did make the man-made elements more noticeable – for example, the hedgehog was not handmade. Furthermore, the mushroom lights required a bit of jiggling and pressing at times, while the LED lights used as part of the performance had quite an obvious battery pack – which we had to stop our babies grabbing at throughout the show. This, as an adult participant, felt quite jarring and removed us for a moment from the magical, natural world being created. I could see a future show weaving these elements further into the theatre and the physical space – for example, perhaps acknowledging the mushroom lights being awkward to turn on and off as a gentle little spark of humour between the keepers.
This piece has a serene, warm and magical feeling to it. I was initially sceptical many of the babies would stick behind the rope line for a whole half an hour, but the piece was mostly mesmerising for them. The clever use of props they could interact with helped with this (many wooden mushrooms were chewed in the course of this production). I’d suggest the performance part of the piece could have been slightly shorter, as I sensed the restlessness of the babies build towards the end and we were all very relieved to be able to let them get their hands on the beautiful mat.
Creating theatre for 0–3 years is always ambitious: keeping children this age engaged in something so gentle, calm and non-verbal even more so. I was impressed with the moments that captured and mesmerised the wee ones; however, there were other moments that need more work to hold us fully in this magical world.
