Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Dream Space
Creative Group SSAK / Korean Season by GCC and AtoBiz
Genre: Children's Theatre, Family, Puppetry
Venue: The Crate at Assembly George Square
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Wonderful and skillful puppetry from the Taiwan Season.
Review
Dream Space is part of the Taiwan Season at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2025. The show opens with a chorus of kazoos and bubbles, humorously coaxing the audience into a playful spirit, including some very lighthearted audience participation. What follows is an hour of extremely skillful and magical puppetry – at times so good you wonder whether it’s being fully appreciated, as each minuscule articulation appears both artistically crafted and meticulously drilled to ensure the puppets achieve maximum impact. Each twitch, each micro-emotion is delivered with expert precision.
When all language is taken out of the occasion, the onus falls heavily on the production to create something truly universal in appeal. This is achieved well via a handful of stories, each one building in pace and purpose as we first meet the characters and then get a sense of what their plight may be. Beginning with two brilliantly crafted hand-puppet magicians whose quick thinking and determination fended off an attack on a seaside town by an angry storm cloud – again, the storm itself creatively delivered via hands in sets of long-sleeved gloves. We then meet two belligerent and befuddled castaways whose greed for a newly arrived treasure nearly costs them their friendship and their lives in a light-hearted scene. Then the most enchanting and introspective of moments came with the arrival of a baby whale and its mother, their interaction with a delicate puppet on a shallow beach leads them all into a deep sea adventure. Water and the ocean played an encompassing thematic role across the stories, loosely tying together each tale and providing a pleasing colour scheme and overall aesthetic.
This production was equally enjoyed by my five-year-old, who sat in wonder, and my ten-year-old, who was in enraptured by its visual spectacle.
Dream Space lives up to its name, carrying the audience on a magical journey that is filled with playful joy.
