Unity, Liverpool
It used to be the case that Sinbad, pronounced in a Liverpool accent, signified a hapless window cleaner from Brookside. Though the hero of Jeff Young's version (a personable performance by Mike Idris) ostensibly lives in the Abbasid caliphate, he's recognisably someone who lives off his wits in the marketplace, if not actually cooking up scams with Jimmy Corkhill. He is, by his own admission, not much of a hero: just an average lad whose globe-trotting adventures tend to happen by default. And he seems to be a fairly inept sailor, judging by the number of times he runs his ship aground – once on a tropical island that turns out to be the back of a whale.
Graeme Phillips's production keeps the five-plus audience riveted by offering fantastical storytelling with an everyday twist. It's easier to identify with genies, after all, when they turn out to be slightly incompetent – rubbing the ring in this instance produces a jobsworth, pot-bellied djinn who grants the usual three wishes, but is notably unreliable when it comes to delivering them.
Designers Katie Scott and Emily Youell transform the theatre into a Bedouin tent whose swagged folds prove endlessly adaptable as sails, cycloramas and the beating wings of a giant bird as Sinbad discovers the true meaning of being stuck between a roc and a hard place. Patrick Dineen's score combines Arabic themes with jaunty singalongs whose reference to genies, Martinis and fettucine seems to have been inspired by a random assault of a rhyming dictionary. Some of the puppetry is deftly realised, some of it is just a group of actors playing with tiny dolls. But you can sense the determination of the young audience to rush home and stage re-enactments of their own.