Mufaro

Charming for its undernine spectators, this Small World Theatre production is also quite slight.

Charming for its undernine spectators, this Small World Theatre production is also quite slight.

Ann Shrosbee and Bill Hamblett put mellifluous Welsh tones to good use in their easy interaction with the eager audience, but they frame an extremely ordinary piece of African tale-telling with an awfully familiar device: essentially, "Hey, Nutty Professor, is that your story machine?"

Moreover, the same Professor talks some annoying rubbish. His story gizmo, it seems, works through reading DNA, so when a child in the audience sneezes into it (very cute, admittedly) he can say: "Oh, I see your greatgranduncle was a poet." This sort of conflation of genetic inheritance and cultural history sounds harmless enough, except that it is the stuff of idiot pop-science, and there's really no point in introducing kids to it so early.

Finishes today. To book phone 01-6770643.