Once upon a time, at the very beginning of human time itself, long before we learned how to write, we told stories. Throughout history, oral stories were an important way of passing down information and a to understand the world. The drive to create, understand, and connect is one of the facets that makes us human and storytelling lets us express that desire. It is, therefore, a universal expression of our humanity. The Ottawa StoryTellers have been around for decades and exist to promote the art of storytelling in the community. Their 2015-2016 Speaking Out/Speaking In debut show, A Winter Tale: The Journey of the Blind Harper, tells of Turlough O’Carolan, Ireland’s famous blind harper of the 18th century. Written by Laurie Fyffe, Kim Kilpatrick and Emily Pearlman and performed by Kim Kilpatrick, Emily Pearlman and harpist Lucile Brais Hildesheim, the story enchants and delivers a cozy evening that spirits us away to far off lands, a long time ago.

A well-crafted story enchants us into its world. It seduces the audience to seamlessly blend their reality and its fiction into one experience. A good story teller sets the atmosphere, but allows the audience to build the sets, cast of characters, and add any details omitted from the telling. This can be overwhelming for the story tellers, but it can be just as intense for the audience. Both, in a sense, are laid bare on the stage. They have nothing to hide behind – no theatrical or technical tricks to hide behind; just words, and imagination.  …

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Photo: William Beddoe.  Lawrence Wall as the narrator.

From the 1920s through the 1940s and beyond, families regularly clustered around floor radios — the main source of electronic entertainment in pre-television days — to hear their favourite dramas. Their imaginations took flight, as the characters they heard (and saw in their minds’ eyes) transported them to new worlds.

One of the earliest of those places was the 100 Acre Wood — first presented by the BBC in a Christmas Day broadcast in 1925. The Wood was the home of Winnie the Pooh, the chief character in A.A. Milne’s classic children’s stories. (The inspiration for Pooh was the teddy bear that belonged to Christopher Robin, the author’s son, and several of the other animals who appear in the tales lived in Christopher’s toy box with the bear.)

Following its tradition of seasonal radio shows, Plosive Productions moves its version of stories of Winnie-the-Pooh and friends, adapted by David Whiteley, to North America. Eeyore the gloomy donkey, for example, is given a Southern drawl, apparently to make him sound even gloomier.

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Photo: William Beddoe`

This 7^th year of mainstage Radio-Shows by Plosive productions  marks the 90^th anniversary of the Winnie-the-Pooh Radio show as it was first broadcast by the BBC in 1925! What a fitting coincidence for A.A. Milne’s work that has become a classic text of young people’s literature. It can now be re-experienced by the generation that grew up reading Pooh stories, and it can also be rediscovered by the internet generation who might never read him but who has no doubt seen his animated movies.

That endearing bear of “very little brain” and his cohort of pals from the 100 Acre Wood come back to amuse us with this staged reading of David Whiteley’s adaptation from the original book and excerpts taken from the later (1929) version of the radio script. The original radio script was based on portions of articles and poems that the author first published in journals and magazines, before bringing all the written work together in his book in 1926.

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