Superheroes do battle to untangle Miss Information’s lies

Three superheroes do battle to untangle Miss Information’s lies and to figure out who to trust.

It’s The Shivers, and it’s coming to The Spring Arts & Heritage Centre, 56 East Street, Havant this half-term on October 26 at 2pm (runs 55 mins; tickets £8 (under 16), £9, £10 at www.thespring.co.uk).

The three-member cast, Isis Clunie, Ben Kulvichit and Kenndrick Horton, play multiple roles in a high-octane theatrical live cartoon featuring clowning, dance, live video and lots of fun in effectively a retro 70s-style spy thriller.

A fox, a pigeon, and a secret agent are on a mission to save the world, but everything is not what it seems. The evil Miss Information and her deadly sleepy agents are on the attack, and now all the colours are wrong and all the sounds are upside down.

When true is false and real is fake, will our superheroes be able to untangle the lies and figure out who to trust? The company emma+pj are promising a gripping fast-paced comedy thriller aimed at seven-11 year olds and their parents.

Isis is loving playing four or five different roles: “It's really fun. The bottom line is that it is the silliest show but also the best show. We helped to make it over a period of four weeks and we put the worlds together. We came up with the characters and developed them, and that process of collaboration was really rewarding.”

As pj says: “So far we have toured it to London schools and we made it as a collaboration with the schools. We worked with young audience and children to design it and to see what they wanted, and now this is the first time we have done it outside London. We designed it with the young people, and at every step of the way we were finding out what worked for them. We designed it so that it wasn't too educational but it does have the themes of fake news and misinformation. We don't want it to feel like a lesson. We want it to feel like a rebellious adventure. It's got dance and video and green screen magic and all sorts of things that make it great fun and really visually stimulating. We wanted to make it as fun as we possibly could.

“But for this age range there are some themes like online safety and how we live in an AI-mediated world that we wanted to explore and that come through. At the end of every show everyone can have a worksheet that they can do with their parents or guardians that gives them an opportunity to open up these discussions around misinformation and fake news and just to start to think about them.”

But the point is that it is a positive show.

It draws on themes of misinformation, fake news and AI, but ultimately it extols the power of friendship and the importance of trusting your gut.

And it does so through characters that its young audience can easily relate to – for instance Miss Information is a stand-in teacher. The fox and the pigeon are equally recognisable, pj says.

“It is fast and farcical with a lot of joy.”