EdFringe Review: Taiwan Season: Where Has All the Fruit Gone?

‘Where Has All the Fruit Gone?’ makes for a charming and impressive hour of theatre each morning down at the Assembly Roxy this Fringe. Created and performed by Yinalang Group, this two-hander takes the humble tangerine and builds a story of family, heritage and migration, culminating in a grand lunar New Year family celebration.

We begin with only one, solitary picture of a tangerine, which the first of two performers uses to engage our imaginations and make us focus on the tangerine as central to their family’s culture.

The intro requires quite a lot of attention, for intended for those 5+, but the early framing scenes showing our tangerine enthusiast arguing with their mother, reluctant to do their homework until promised a tangerine as a prize, are very sweet. The illuminated eyes and disembodied hands carrying a duster and a toilet brush certainly make for a unique parent! There are certainly plenty of chuckles to be had from their family parent-child dialogue.

“‘Where Has All the Fruit Gone?’ makes for a charming and impressive hour of theatre each morning down at the Assembly Roxy this Fringe.”

Soon, we discover the New Year tradition of gifting tangerines with stickers, reading either ‘Happiness’ or ‘Prosperity’, prompting an imaginative journey as to how a tangerine might earn its sticker within tangerine society.

From the wall of cardboard boxes behind, trays of orange-themed objects are soon produced: orange-scented toilet bleach, fizzy juice, ceramic oranges with little oranges inside and more. Each is a character in the story, most particularly Grand Aunty, the fizzy juice who might just explode if shaken up with too many questions.

They’ve all gathered to celebrate the New Year, and for Grandpa to tell the story of how they came to be.

The performers are excellent, gently comedic and highly expressive. The story is sweet and thought-provoking, whilst the production enjoys a lovely escalation as simple, but more and more impressive technical elements come into play.

Perhaps something is lost in translation, or perhaps I missed something critical, but whilst the show culminates in a fullsome, musical shadow puppetry sequence, I struggled to take much more from it than a lovely, meditative dream on the steady advance of humanity through time.

Conversely, an earlier message on the importance of having a dream, before a dream can come true, certainly rang true, whether for baby tangerines or humans of any age. Overall, there was plenty to enjoy in ‘Where Has All the Fruit Gone’, and if I didn’t grasp every nuance, it still made my morning a happier place.