A story, a house and a relationship are built – both metaphorically and literally – with the help of the young audience. Working for the first time with the NTG, the award-winning childrenΆs playwrights Angelos Angelou and Emi Sini have created a production of few words that nonetheless has a lot to say. What are houses and buildings made of? And what about relationships, patience and trust? How do we deal with obstacles and setbacks? How do we handle our mistakes? Can we cope on our own or is it better to ask for help? Should we share our ideas or keep them to ourselves?

The key themes of this production, which is all about creating, experimenting and improvising, are friendship, the value of cooperation and effort, perseverance, the joy of success, but also coping with failure: concepts that concern all children of school and pre-school age. The characters struggle, investigate, get tired, build, demolish and in the end realise that four hands are better than two.

With a nod to silent cinema and slapstick comedy, director Fivos Simeonidis creates an interactive space with an unorthodox building-site set, where young audiences engage with a funny, fabulous, moving story. They are encouraged to play an active role in this “constructed” pandemonium, coming up with ideas, providing support, building, demolishing, answering questions and advising the characters at key moments in the story. The play thus works on two levels, the realistic and the symbolic, treating the big issues of friendship, trust, cooperation, creativity and effort with humour and playfulness.