Jings, crivens and help mah boab! Thurz a moose loose in her papa’s hoose! But is his granddaughter (dancer Ruth Janssen) frightened? Not a jot. In fact, she’s glad of the company. For as is apparent by her ashen face and glum expression and melancholic rendition of You Are My Sunshine by The Letter J founders Judith Williams and Jon Bishop, she is down in the dumps and up in the air after her beloved papa has “gone out to sea”. Not to catch a fish alive or listen to the delightfully performed “chipping forecast”, but to set sail for the land of the eternal sleepers.

Grief weighs her down like an anchor. But through remembering the good times and reenacting their adventures ‒ pottering about in the garden; eating ice cream by the sea; singing along to their favourite tunes on the gramophone; and looking up into the night sky and imagining a more innocent and kinder world where the moon is made of cheese and the future stretches out into infinity like a gigantic picnic blanket ‒ she learns how to dry her peepers; hop, skip and stumble her way through the rock pools of grief; and face the world again with a smile on her face and a song in her heart. Or as Nat King Cole more succinctly put it, a “stardust melody / The memory of love’s refrain.”

Quite simply, Grandad and Me is one of the most beautiful shows I’ve seen in a long time. Coming in at just under forty minutes it as, as one audience member remarked afterwards, “small but perfectly formed”. Combining dance and drama, puppetry and projection, live music and song ‒ anyone who can provoke tears of laughter and sadness through a colander and a wire brush deserves a lifetime supply of Werther’s Originals ‒ it succeeds in fulfilling the The Letter J’s tongue in cheek aims of seeking “cups of tea and yum yums” and offering “a version of the world that is as tasty as it can be.”

Peter Callaghan
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