Guest post: Matthew Finch on ZooNation's 'Into the Hoods'

This summer, ZooNation’s Into the Hoods has returned to London at the Royal Festival Hall after an acclaimed 2008 season in the West End.

The ninety-minute urban dance show, which made its debut at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006, follows a boy and girl who, venturing out of their playground, become prisoners of the landlord of the Ruff Endz estate.

At the outset, a narrator speaks over animations of an illuminated manuscript book and a twinkling music-box refrain, giving the gloss of tradition, but the MC’s announcement, ‘This is theatre…but this is hip-hop theatre, so MAKE SOME NOISE!’ lets audiences know that they’re not exactly in for Danny Kaye in Hans Christian Andersen.

On the Ruff Endz estate, familiar figures from the world of fairytale are updated for the urban present. Spinderella is an aspiring DJ; ‘Prince’ is a Pop Idol reject, the estate’s ‘E-list’ celebrity; Wolf is a money-grabbing wannabe record mogul, while Lil Red dreams of singing stardom, and Jax of being a record producer, while the crimelord Giant does his deals from a penthouse at the top of the tower block.

The landlord makes a bargain with the lost children – he will give them money for bus tickets home if they fetch gifts for the 18th birthday of his daughter Rap-on-Zel: ‘An iPod white as milk, a hoodie as red as blood, weave as yellow as corn, and trainers as pure as gold.’

On their quest, the children interact with the iconic fairytale characters, who play out their stories in contemporary form – Wolf luring Lil Red into an exploitative record contract by impersonating her Grandma, Jax ascending to the Giant’s penthouse for a martial-arts faceoff, and Spinderella empowered to DJ at Prince’s ball, thanks to the gold shell-suited Fairy Gee, who dances to Destiny’s Child’s Independent Women.

There’s a lot of fun to be had in this witty, energetic show – from the spot-on musical choices (Spinderella’s theme is the plaintive ‘Roads’ by Portishead, that of the Ugly Sisters ‘U-G-L-Y’ by Daphne and Celeste) to the inspired choreography, including a couple of eye-popping perspective shifts which allow the Giant to fall ‘away’ from the audience and Rap-on-Zel’s hair to be climbed across stage to the theme from Mission: Impossible.

The whole show is ripe with modern references – the due date for Jax’s rent is counted down as an homage to ‘24’, and pensioners dance off with zimmer frames and wheelchairs in a parody of It’s Like That, while Rap-on-Zel’s room is decorated with posters of Eminem, Foxy Brown and Missy Elliott…and prison-style tally marks scratched on her wall.

For fairy tale lovers, however, the most exciting change to the traditional stories lies in their juxtaposition. What were, in traditional versions, quest narratives with single protagonists, become the linked struggles of a community on the estate. Friendships and allegiances complicate the idea of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ characters – ‘Prince’ is unreliable and egotistical, but he gets on with Jax; the girls show solidarity with one another and are all equally immune to reject Prince’s advances; when Jax is evicted and left homeless, it is Lil Red who is there for him (they share iPod earphones and even have a romantic moment beneath a ‘Match.com’ billboard).

The production is punchy, unsentimental about its urban setting, but also true to the tales from which it draws, and positive about the human spirit to the extent that every character gets their happy ending (including the Ugly Sisters, who become a girl group lip-synching to the Shoop Shoop Song).

Kate Prince’s show remains an inspired and vibrant tribute to the power of the fairy tale, loosely adapted from Sondheim’s Into the Woods but by now very much its own work. It’s on throughout the first half of August at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank, and well worth a visit for any lover of fairytales. You’ll find all the information you need for a visit at www.intothehoods.com


Matthew Finch blogs at booksadventures.blogspot.com

Guest post: Matthew Finch on Playbox Theatre's 'The Bloody Chamber'

Going in for the kill: Playbox Electric Carousel’s
The Bloody Chamber

Cox’s Yard in Stratford-upon-Avon was the venue for last month’s stage adaptation of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, devised and performed by members of youth theatre company Playbox.

As the audience arrived, the stairs to the riverside performance space were strewn with pages torn from women’s magazines, blurring the transition from everyday life to a darker fairytale world. On stage, girls in heavy 1980’s make-up, with back-combed hair and red sashes, hands clutched to hearts, stood frozen by the sound of a high pitched alarm.

In the opening dance, a suited man – the malevolent husband of the protagonist – moved among the girls, posing them, dancing with them, tearing out their hearts in his search for the perfect woman. The show, which centres on Carter’s version of the Bluebeard myth, follows a newlywed’s discovery that her husband has murdered his previous wives in the chamber of the title.

As director Alice Trew explains, her take on Carter strips the 1979 story collection ‘down to the bare bones, giving the essence of a harsh and violent tale’. Trew’s magpie approach steals scenes from across Carter’s writing, but violence, control and desire are always at the fore of this potent staging. With virtually no dialogue in the show, Carter’s sensuous language is invoked by melodramatic choreography – most effectively in the sequence where the husband uses mirrors to multiply his wife into a ‘harem’.

One effect of the wordless, iconic approach is to remove the context of the Bluebeard story, which Carter set in post-revolutionary France. Place names are erased, and a red ribbon tied around the bride’s neck still stands for decapitation, but no longer relates to the ironic neckwear which aristocrats wore if they had escaped the Terror.

For Trew, this stripping out of detail universalizes the issue of women’s suffering under patriarchy, across nations and throughout history. In the story’s resolution, which is greatly changed, women’s capacity to jointly resist oppression is emphasised. Where Carter has the bride’s mother ride to the rescue toting a handgun, the husband here dies at the hands of the girls whose hearts he stole in the opening dance, with the mother delivering the coup de grace.

The original’s happily-ever-after conclusion is replaced by an extended sequence derived from Carter’s vampiric Lady of the House of Love. The widowed bride blinds herself with the key to her husband’s chamber and attacks the women’s magazines that litter the stage with their incessant bombardment of words and images. She feasts on stolen hearts…before turning on her new lover to quote her husband’s ominous words: ‘This is the key that leads to the kingdom of the unimaginable.’

All of this could seem like a blunt, though necessary and laudable, retread of 70’s and 80’s feminist polemic – The Beauty Myth For Beginners by a youth theatre company. In fact, the Playbox production offers something more complex. The opening sequence, set to the pastiche electro of La Roux, creates a kind of historical commentary on the 80’s – a decade of blood and opulence – from a company of players not born in the decade. As the music leads us through to the present day, the protagonist’s journey becomes also a journey from the feminism of the 70’s to women’s contemporary struggles, as charted by these young performers.

The show as a whole, with its fairytale atmosphere and uncompromising gender politics, is an invocation of fables in a 21st century that, from Twilight to Doctor Who and The Fairy Tale Cupboard itself, has returned to the fairy tale to make sense of the world around us. In this world, Trew suggests, ‘Women have forsaken trying to be angels and instead focus on simply not becoming monsters’.


Matthew Finch blogs at booksadventures.blogspot.com
Photographs by James Blay

Marina Warner on the RSC's Arabian Nights

It's been a fantastic season for fairy tale theatre in the UK, as well as the ubiquitous pantomime there have been many exciting productions drawing on fairy tales and folklore. I've been lucky enough to see two of them - The Library Theatre's Grimm Tales (deliciously dark with a great selection of tales) and En Masse Theatre Company's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (enjoyable and inventive - the audience all had to don green lensed glasses when Dorothy and friends reached The Emerald Kingdom!).

One other production I would love to see is the RSC's Arabian Nights. Marina Warner wrote an article about it in yesterday's Guardian. She reviews the production and she also gives us some fascinating tidbits of the history of the Nights on stage, here's just a taste:

'In the theatre especially, the sheer abundance of the plots of the Nights opened up possibilities: the book presented magical twists and turns that intrinsically lent themselves to high-spirited performance and to technical experiment. The history of the Nights on the stage is consequently intertwined with some brilliant early stagecraft for transformation scenes, flying machines, conjuring illusions, innovatory limelight and other effects (in Islington in the 1890s, the genies in Aladdin were called after the new gases, Paraffin, Benzoline and Colza).'

The Arabian Nights is on at the RSC's Courtyard Theatre until the 30th January. And although the glut of seasonal fairy tale shows has now nearly passed there is Andersen's English to look forward to - a new production by Out of Joint, written by novelist Sebastian Barry:

'Celebrated children's writer Hans Christian Andersen arrives, unannounced, for a stay at Gad's Hill Place in the Kent marshes - home to Charles Dickens and his large, charismatic family.

To the lonely and eccentric guest, the members of Dicken's household seem to live a life of unreachable bliss. But with his broken English, Andersen doesn't at first see the tensions in the family: undeclared passions, a son sent to serve in India, and a growing strangeness at the heart of Dickens's marriage.'

This should be interesting, especially as the relationship between the two writers soured after this visit. The production will be touring in Spring 2010.

(ps - If you follow the link to the Guardian to read Marina Warner's article I'd also recommend Margaret Atwood's plea for birds, which made me think of her beautiful essay 'Of Souls as Birds' in Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, in which she explored her love of fairy tales in which people are transformed into birds)

Grimm Tales

I went to see Grimm Tales at Manchester's Library Theatre last week and it was fantastic! Energetically performed and deliciously dark - it was great to see the Grimm's tales getting an outing with the grim bits left in.

First performed in 1994 at the Young Vic, the play was adapted from the Grimm's tales by Carol Ann Duffy and dramatised by Tim Supple. This production has been directed for the Library Theatre by Rachel O'Riordan and is engagingly performed by eight actors, dressed like a raggedy troupe of storytellers, who dance, act, make music and tell the tales with relish.

One of the things I really enjoyed was the eclectic selection of tales; there was a real mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. I also thought the inclusion of Ashputtel and The Lady and the Lion worked well as people are usually more familiar with their French literary predecessors, Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast.

Here are the Grimm's tales that are used in the show in versions that are available online:

Hansel and Gretel (here I've linked to a page that gives translations of both the 1812 and 1857 versions - which makes for very interesting reading)
The Golden Goose
Ashputtel
Iron Hans
The Mouse, the Bird and the Sausage
The Lady and the Lion (also known as The Singing, Springing Lark)
Little Red Cap

I'd also really recommend Carol Ann Duffy's book Rumpelstiltskin and other Grimm Tales (1999) which includes her versions of all of the above (apart from The Mouse, the Bird and the Sausage), and many more, and is a delight to read.

There's an interview with Duffy on the Library Theatre website, in which she talks about how she went about retelling the tales.

I've also written a review of the show for a site called Artsphere here.

Grimm Tales is on at The Library Theatre until 23rd January - get there if you can!