SHOCKHEADED PETER. To 16 June.

London

SHOCKHEADED PETER
created by Julian Bleach, Anthony Cairns, Graeme Gilmour, Tamzin Griffin, Jo Pocock music by David Thomas, Andy Diagram, Keith Moline

Albery Theatre
Mon-Wed/Fri-Sat 8.00 Thur 6.30 & 10pm Mat Sat 3pm
Runs 1hr 40min No interval

TICKETS 020 7369 1730
Review Timothy Ramsden 14 April 2002

A colourful mix of music, lyrics and design creates a theatrical big-dipper of thrills and frights.In 1844 German doctor Heinrich Hoffmann wrote and illustrated Struwwelpeter, a book aimed at calming nervous child patients. I salute the tough infants of mid-19th century Germany. When I was shown the English Shockheaded Peter as a child, I threw the book across the room in horror. It wasn't the words – I never got to those – but the crude drawings of a child with a wild heath of hair and spindly, elongated finger-nails.

Though Hoffmann saw his verses as improving on moralising stories for the young, they carry the sickly-sweet stench of Victorian sentimentality sugaring a cruelty that delights in putting the frighteners on the rising generation.

This 'junk opera' plays on a Victorian toy-theatre set, ironically blown back up to full-size. With advent calendar ingenuity, doors and traps pop open to reveal 2D furniture, scarifyingly exaggerated Victorian-dress figures and an 'elephant terrible' musician, a mountainous figure sweating away at a squeeze-box. Two more grotesques accompany with sounds musical and atmospheric. Music makes a great contribution: even without Martyn Jacques' eerily unearthly falsetto, such a devastating part of the original production, the tunes remain sinister in their cloying simplicity.

Presiding over this is the most grotesque of these stage caricatures, the self-styled 'greatest actor in the world' narrator. Leering and jeering behind his grimace-grin expression, this horrific showman introduces Hoffmann's tales of naughty children.

Deliberately, the show takes time to wind into action. It's in the frame story of Shockheaded Peter himself that the horror first flies in our face. No naughty child refusing to have his hair and nails cut, he's a deformed baby, born with hair-bush and wildly-elongated nails– the wish-fulfilment of his parents' two-dimensional, childless life actuated as a nightmare.

Their decision to hide him under the floorboards creates the atmosphere of suppression in which Hoffmann's morality tales unfold while a rivalry develops between narrator and singer and Peter's parents develop their son's deformities, until their suppressed horror rises from the cellar to be revealed as the wicked narrator. Here's the final moral, children: if you don't like the tale, don't trust the teller.

Cast:
Julian Bleach, Anthony Cairns, Tamzin Griffin, Graeme Gilmour/Ewan Hunter, Alison McGowan/Rebekah Wild

Co-Directors: Phelim McDermott, Julian Crouch
Co-Designers: Julian Crouch, Graeme Gilmour
Lighting: Jon Linstrum/Phil Supple
Sound: Roland Higham
Costume: Kevin Pollard
Musical Director: Martyn Jacques

2002-04-16 07:20:13