fairytales
Ismene Brown
Fairy tales are fear tales really, the sweetening (and sharpening) of every child’s worst nightmares, emotions long buried in adulthood but very easily tapped back into with good theatre productions. The Witch in Hansel and Gretel should be the queen of the team of the ogres who lurk in forests or homes waiting to kill children, along with lieutenants the Wolf in Red Riding Hood, Snow White’s wicked stepmother and Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty. Last night’s opening of the Royal Opera’s revival of its jaunty 2008 production fielded in a splendid cast a tremendous Witch, Jane Henschel, the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
London is a magical place at this time of year - so many streets with their individual lighting schemes and colours, and nowhere I think is lovelier than the new-look Southbank Centre, where from the side of the Festival Hall swings a spacious canopy of silver-blue trickles reflected in the glass of the new cafés alongside, a captivating, super-chic Thames-side installation. Into this urban grotto last night Kneehigh Theatre’s bouncy, folksy Hansel and Gretel came as welcome as a homemade mince pie.This is another ration of the ever-popular Brothers Grimm this Christmas, and very superior Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Once upon a time there was a free spirit called Tim, who fell in love with olde folk tales and created little shows all about spells and wonders, and peopled them with princes and princesses, farmers and animals. When he was more grown up, he formed a gang with another free spirit and then with a lady known as the Poet Laureate, who came from a cold, snow-covered country in the North. Then the three of them created a bigger show and staged it in a city called Bristol in the West of England several years ago. Then finally they brought this show, which had grown and grown, to the chief city of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
What a stunning show Matthew Bourne has created in his Blitz-era Cinderella - truly a magical ride created from what was in its original 1997 form a pumpkin waiting to be transformed. This must be the most heartwarming and sophisticatedly rewarding Christmas show in London, filled with a huge love of the city and a moving homage to humanity in wartime. Old newsreel, an eye for Powell and Pressburger style, some stunning sets, and - Bourne’s masterstroke - a brilliantly filmic recording of Prokofiev's score in sound-surround with much atmospheric enhancement all make this an exceptional Read more ...
graham.rickson
It’s a neat conceit to set this retelling of Aladdin in Leeds’s Kirkgate Market, a short stroll across a dual carriageway from the West Yorkshire Playhouse. It’s still an evocative and atmospheric location, and worth visiting as an antidote to all that’s bland and corporate about modern Leeds. Barney George’s set is spanned by an impressively solid-looking wrought-iron staircase and walkway, climbed on, crawled under, dangled from, and at one point used as a percussion instrument.Mike Kenny’s new adaptation is his fifth annual collaboration with director Gail McIntyre, and it follows an Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“You’ve never heard a fairy tale before unless you’ve heard it told by a real fairy. And I am a real fairy.” Festooned with magic, colour and humour, the National Theatre’s Christmas production of Beauty and the Beast is solid-oak tradition gift-wrapped with just enough shiny, iconoclastic naughtiness to sneak it past the children. Wooing with conjuring tricks, slick visual effects and wit, its soft-centred sincerity comes as a surprise, a sugar-coated stiletto aimed at those with a weakness for festive sentimentality.Compered by the riotously camp Man in Pink (Justin Salinger) and his Read more ...
judith.flanders
Fairy-tale ballets are a bitch. We all grow a mental image of what is “right” when we are about five, and then woe betide anyone whose vision is different – because of course it isn’t different, it’s “wrong”. So David Bintley and his designer, John Macfarlane, are up against audiences chock-full of preconceived notions. And I’m happy to say, after BRB’s premiere of their new Christmas show last night, they passed my inner-five-year-old test with flying colours.Cinderella is even trickier than most fairy-tale ballets. As I said last week, Prokofiev’s music is almost anti-fairy tale – it’ Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The designer of a fairytale ballet is far, far more important than the choreographer. It's those visions that lodge themselves in children's heads, in adults' memories, embedded with the music. And at no time more potently than Christmas when it's time for The Nutcracker and Cinderella. When people think of ballet design they may think of John Macfarlane, the genius of Birmingham Royal Ballet's Nutcracker and the Royal Ballet's Giselle, and Peter Farmer, the confectioner of Birmingham's Coppelia and the Royal Ballet's latest Sleeping Beauty. Both men are stepping up to the plate again this Read more ...
judith.flanders
Christmas rolls around, and so does Cinderella, a welcome alternative to the seasonal dance-critic bah-humbug that is The Nutcracker. First, the good news. The good news is Marianela Nuñez. Always a lovely dancer, in Ashton she just glows. No one could be more suited than she to Ashton’s fiendishly difficult petite batterie, those tiny, beaten, viciously fast steps; no one could be more suited than she to Ashton’s light, bright jumps: with her sunny temperament and lovely punchy ballon Nuñez rises (literally) to the choreography’s demands.She is not an effortless dancer, not one of Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Halvard Solness and Hilde Wangel have stalked each other among the shadow goblins of Henrik Ibsen’s extraordinary symbol-laden drama in two major productions this year. In Chichester, Philip Franks’s staging and David Edgar’s new version of the text gave us a shivery, haunted-house interpretation. Now comes American director Travis Preston’s modern-dress offering, starkly designed by Vicki Mortimer, but performed with such over-deliberate mannerism and stylised Expressionist movement by Stephen Dillane in the title role that it sometimes manages to be both po-faced and faintly ludicrous.The Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Flux, the second in a trio of exhibitions devoted to images of women by women, immediately grabs your attention with an in-your-face animation by Swedish artist Natalie Djurberg. Clay figures enact grotesque stories that have a nasty, fairytale edge. A naked mother plays with her five children until, one after another, the youngsters climb into her vagina and disappear. This return to the womb proves problematic, though, for as the siblings jostle for space, their limbs begin to pop out through the mother’s back, belly and thighs, eventually turning her into a monstrous composite lumbering Read more ...
graham.rickson
There’s something deliciously extravagant about this Pinocchio by composer Jonathan Dove and librettist Alasdair Middleton. It’s remarkably faithful to Carlo Collodi’s picaresque text, and so we get everything. Elaborately costumed characters enter with spectacular props, then disappear having barely made their point, my favourite being the four top-hatted black rabbits who threaten to escort Pinocchio offstage in a coffin after he’s refused to take his medicine.This revival of a piece first staged in 2007 is on a massive scale – elaborate sets, dancers, puppets, acrobats and a large chorus, Read more ...