Grimm Tales
by The Brothers Grimm

Reviewed by Theo Spring for The Croydon Advertiser

Blessed with a perfect summer night, nine familiar fairy tales were presented, each with an unusual ingredient. For these were the tales from the Brothers Grimm in an “unexpurgated” form, complete with some very gory details. A large cast, a bevy of different directors, and an original musical score from three talented writers – Mark Taylor, Dominic Russell and Peter Bird – combined to create a successful show. The garden of The Woodman pub in Woodmansterne offered a long wide grassy stage which enabled the several “walks into the forest” to be very realistic. Scenery and props were kept to a minimum, but came into their own in the last playlet The Magic Table, where the table in question produced immediate food, the cudgel magically beat the baddie, and the donkey who produced gold. Well, let’s just say that “where there’s muck, there’s brass” and leave it to the imagination. Costumes were glamorous in period style. The hedgehogs in The Hare and the Hedgehogs wore wonderful masks and prickles, the sun and moon faces were beautiful, the lion in The Lady and the Lion bore a superb name and the aforementioned donkey’s head was straight out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. However, they were all beaten into the shade by the face of the witch in Hansel and Gretel, played by a stooped Lisa Lloyd in full cackle. The translation of the tales by Carol Ann Duffy makes frequent use of characters moving their own stories along. This gave pace and interest to the tales which provided some outstanding performances. In The Golden Goose, Chris Blakeney’s Dummling was droll, yet his Wolf in Little Red Cap was suave and persuasive. In The Lady and the Lion, Nicky Greene was an earnest daughter and wife; in Ashputtel (which we know as Cinderella), the two stepsisters, Tanya Allison and Lisa Lloyd, were bitchiness incarnate. Emma Rose really stole the evening as Little Red Cap, and Luke Argles made an evil little Rumpelstiltskin. The lion’s share of the storytelling roles was taken by an erudite Richard Lloyd. Ethereal sprites bore props on and off and scampered to assist when needed, and the young doves added balletic elegance. A major team effort and a most entertaining production.