CINDERELLA. To 3 January.
London.
CINDERELLA
by Ben Power and Melly Still.
Lyric Hammersmith To 3 January 2009.
10am 15, 17 Dec.
1.30pm 15-17 Dec.
2pm 20, 22-24, 27, 30, 31 Dec, 2, 4 Jan.
7pm 18-20, 22, 23, 27, 29, 30 Dec, 2, 3 Jan.
Audio-described 30 Dec 2pm
Gala Performance: 19 Dec.
Captioned 29 Dec.
Runs 2hr 10min One interval.
TICKETS: 0871 221 1721.
www.lyric.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 13 December.
Stages and ashes rather than godmother and coach, and no trace of a pantomime.
This bleakly beautiful production starts from the Grimm brothers’ version of the Cinderella story, with no Godmother, mice or midnight carriage. Moreover, writers Ben Power and Melly Still (who also directs) have turned the tale into a kind of inward detective trail, where the Prince, who has all the power and mobility, has to piece together past incidents and sort the misleading account from the truth, to find the mysterious girl in blue whom he saw at the ball.
Cinderella’s lost shoe seems more integral to the story, pierced by an arrow in a play where hunting deer is important. Her ball visit is the only point she has been able to act; she almost ends up shut in the family coal-store. The cruelty against her is more powerfully resonant because it comes not in sudden, open nastiness but through an accretion of oppression, sometimes under the guise of reason, pleasantness, even what seems at first like friendliness.
Her two step-sisters, Dorothy and Candide, initially seem laughing, playful people, but it becomes clear their relationship excludes other people, with an external appearance of childhood candour that makes any lie they tell believable. And Cinderella’s stepmother seems reasonable when, similarly to Natasha in Three Sisters, she calmly, yet firmly, announces Cinderella’s lovely bedroom will be ideal for her own children.
There’s a cold look to the staging, in the bare disorder of Sophia Clist’s double-decker setting, the real world downstairs, the upper level a place for music and the occasional glimpsed vision. And in Natasha Chivers’ cold-coloured and white lighting, plus the borderland of sound and music from onstage Icelandic musician Terje Isungset, whose final contribution is aptly enough from an instrument of ice.
Take seriously the Lyric’s lower age limit of 7+. The dismemberment of the sisters’ feet doesn’t splash blood but involves lifelike incisions. And the storytelling, rightly to catch the sense of disorientation and partial understandings in the minds of Cinderella and the Prince, is more collage than linear. But finally, it resolves movingly, and is throughout an imaginatively invigorating journey, besides being visually and often aurally beautiful.
Cinderella: Elizabeth Chan.
Prince: Daniel Weyman.
Father: Tim McMullan.
Stepmother: Grainne Byrne.
Dorothy: Katherine Manners.
Candide: Kelly Williams.
Director: Melly Still.
Designer: Sophia Clist.
Lighting: Natasha Chivers.
Sound: Nick Manning.
Composer: Terje Isungset.
Assistant director: Elgiva Field.
2008-12-15 11:36:34