I discovered Creation Theatre’s innovative shows a couple of years ago and have always hugely enjoyed them. In fact, their performance of The Time Machine at the London Library was the last live theatre I attended in February 2020.
I wasn’t sure how their brand of immersive theatre would work in the virtual environment – and the truth is, it is a very different beast. It’s not the kind of online show where the audience is expected to interact, to type something in or read something out loud, like the very experimental show I saw back in April/May 2020 courtesy of New Diorama Theatre. Instead, it was recommended that we dim the lights, light a candle and sit back to watch and listen (preferably without any young children).
Although this was an adaptation of the Grimm brothers’ stories, it was much closer in spirit to the original, often quite horrific folk tales rather than the sanitised fairy tale versions we habitually offer to children. Each of the five stories was chosen because of its links and resonance with the current lockdown situation. Death, mental and physical cruelty, a sense of being imprisoned, all make their appearance. Two of the stories are very well-known: ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ (although in a modern, cynical retelling), and ‘Hansel and Gretel’. But ‘Malinka or the Juniper Tree’, ‘The Moon’ and ‘The Physician and Godfather Death’ will be far less familiar to most readers.
Each story is told by a different narrator/actor, all extravagantly costumed and made up, yet with nowhere to go. Literally hiding in a box or a dark room. The extreme close-up on their faces at times, the missing or rotten teeth, the shadows falling on their excessive make-up added to the sense of creepiness. The stories are left unfinished and then we move onto the next, in a pattern that I initially thought was like Chinese boxes, but which was actually more like a braid. Themes disappear and reappear, sometimes just a few sentences spoken by each actor, woven into something that is bigger than the mere individual strands. Some of the sound effects were a bit overpowering at times, which made one or two of the actors harder to understand.
Yet the show managed to capture the immediacy and excitement of sitting by the camp fire, scaring each other silly with ghost stories, taking us back to our ancestral love of storytelling. Perhaps a bit gimmicky, yet it all seems to come together at the end in a rather moving candlelit finale and the message of ‘You are not alone in the wild woods.’
Grimm Tales is available now on-demand from the Creation Theatre website until the 13th of March.
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