Keeping it simple

It’s often the simplest ideas that make the best picture books — for example, a caterpillar who gets very hungry, a cat in a hat, a tiger coming to tea or a group of children going on a bear hunt (“we’re going to catch a big one!”).

Just ask Tim Bray, who’s about to stage his 28-year-old theatre company’s 96th production. He’s adapted Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury’s kids’ classic, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt for the stage and it’s a “world premiere” — at least of his version of the story — to mark the popular book’s 30th anniversary.

Bray knows of only one other theatre company, in the UK, that has taken the story from page to stage. That version, by Sally Cookson, got a run on the West End before touring the UK. Bray’s might be a first for New Zealand, but he’s not 100 per cent certain.

What he does know is he’s been pleasantly surprised at the reception to the story, about an adventurous family who decide to take walk on the wild side and hunt for a bear. The intrepid explorers have to overcome long grass, oozying mud, deep and cold rivers, a snowstorm and walk into a dark forest before finally confronting — much to their surprise, it seems — the bear.

Bray says We’re Going on a Bear Hunt is outselling even Badjelly the Witch. He knows, from visiting Auckland libraries to read the 1989 story to children, that it’s extremely popular but he didn’t imagine it was quite this big. Then again, in 2014, it was the subject of a Guinness World Record for Largest Reading Lesson with 1500 children attending a book-reading and a staggering additional 30,000 listeners online.

What does he think kids like about it? Maybe the sound of the words — there’s a lot of onomatopoeia — and the fact that it’s a family journey where, even when you know the outcome, there’s still an element of surprise perhaps because of the rythym of how its read.

Bray’s cast is headed by Stephen Papps as Dad with seven students from the Tim Bray Youth Theatre playing the younger children. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt is on at the Pumphouse Theatre, Takapuna, from Saturday, June 29-Sunday, July 20.