While billed as a Christmas story, The Lost Library of Leake Street is much more. Told by two actors who are transformed through the stories held by objects, the script jumps through time to tell these stories. The production is housed in the basement space in The Glitch — long and narrow with the audience in alley style along two walls, with shelves and objects filling every corner of the space. The detail in the set design is delightful, but more exciting was the lighting design which despite limited technical capacity, leveraged the use of practicals, fairy lights, and some well-placed theatrical lighting to focus our attention and create the magical worlds where these stories live.
The two performers were equally matched. There was a gentle energy about the performances — where so many performances these days are high energy and large, both actors were soft and subtle in their embodiment of the characters. They let the words to the work, letting themselves be the conduit for the story.
The relationship to the space and the engaged complicity of the audience made this seem different to so much other work we see these days. While no single element felt innovative in itself, the relationships and connections between them made it so.