PLAY REVIEW: Mrs Armitage on Wheels ★★★

Quentin Blake’s Mrs Armitage on Wheels is a small, cheerful machine of a show: inventive, slightly anarchic and powered by the sheer pleasure of making things. Samantha Lane’s adaptation of Blake’s picture book sends its eccentric heroine pedalling towards a cousin’s house, only for every apparently straightforward journey to inspire another upgrade to her bicycle.

Lottie Johnson brings Mrs Armitage a winning combination of brisk practicality and childlike wonder, singing Jessie Maryon Davies’s jaunty songs with infectious gusto. Duncan Taylor puppeteers Breakspear, an floppy-eared dog, while Taylor and Christopher Dobson slip between an assortment of supporting characters and puppets with dexterity. 

Ryan Dawson Laight’s wooden shed is an effective piece of design: part workshop, part magic box, it continually yields the bits and pieces required for Mrs Armitage’s inventions. Maia Kirkman-Richards’s puppetry keeps the visual language close to Blake’s eccentric line drawings, while Ian Oakley’s sound design gives the production a lively rhythmic pulse.