HANSEL AND GRETEL. To 27 May.

Edinburgh

HANSEL AND GFRETEL

Brunton Theatre Musselburgh for THE BANK OF SCOTLAND CHILDREN’S INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL 2007 To 27 May 2007
Runs 1hr 10mins. No interval.

TICKETS: 0131 228 1404.
Review: Thelma Good 23 May 2007.

Going indoors cramps style.
Gill Robertson, director of Catherine Wheels Theatre company, has revisited her 2006 site-specific award-winning production of Hansel and Gretel, originally created for the National Theatre of Scotland, and brought it indoors. We are led up a stair and pass aromatic fir trees to look into a 1980’s-styled front room where a sharp-nosed, dark-haired woman postures and dances to the Bay City Rollers. She throws out toys and children’s crude and cruel drawings of a stepmother. It’s a premature triumph, for a few minutes later in come Hansel and Gretel who have found their way back from the wood.

The family life we see as we all stand in their main room is very awry; their saxophonist father seems at times very fond of his children and then he does nothing to protect then from the cartoon-like stepmother. Later he agrees with her they must take the children back to the woods. Then we are moved to find ourselves with Hansel and Gretel in a strange neck of the woods with posters of missing children and bones and eerie sounds.

Deeper in, past stranger and stranger trees we get to the witch’s house. There’s no gingerbread but there is a sumptuous spread of theatrical food. Soon the smiling lady urging them to eat transforms into a scabby, scalped being and the groaning board into a prison. Gretel finds herself creating meals to fatten her caged brother from the Witch’s Cooking-for-Kids book in a magnificent oven.

Performed originally in the dark of winter and using three settings including a walk through a real candle-lit wood, this revisited version takes place in early summer in a large room on the first floor of the building housing the Brunton Theatre. Despite Tommy Mullins’ and Susan Harrison’s well created Hansel and Gretel this 2007 production needs a bigger space for the action to follow throughout the promenade. One with those touches of living nature which rarely goes amiss in site specific work or promenade, whether it be living trees or real worn floors and walls or the smell of real things.

Hansel: Tommy Mullins
Gretel : Susan Harrison
Stepmother/Witch : Cath Whitefield
Father/Saxophonist : Steve Kettley
Cellist : Joel Sanderson

Director: Gill Robertson
Designer: Karen Tennent
Lighting: Jeanine Davies
Sound: Mark Södergen
Composer: Steve Kettley
Costume: Alison Brown

2007-05-27 23:58:54