Any Russians in the audience expecting to find the Baba Yaga of childhood stories may be mightily surprised. Windmill Theatre and Imaginate’s production is the theatrical equivalent of a jazz take on a familiar tune: lots of bits of the original are in there, but not necessarily where you might expect to find them. Here is no “bony old witch” who eats children and lives in a wooden house that struts the world on a pair of chicken legs. Instead, a tall, elegant lady resides on the topmost floor of a tower block from which she blasts techno sounds throughout the building and in which she encourages cacti to flower and cats (forbidden by the management) to purr. Vaselina (Shona Reppe), the tower’s shy, repressed receptionist, compelled by furious neighbours to put a stop to the music, braves Baba Yaga in this den (where giant knives, forks, a boiling cauldron and chicken legs make fleeting appearances).
Vaselina’s mission may prove impossible, but Baba Yaga (Christine Johnston) teaches her that little else is (“Impossible? It spells I’m possible!”), whisking her, via a ceiling-shattering flight, to stars, mountain peaks and self-realisation.
If the throughline drive sometimes dissipates in absurdist riffs, the ensemble interplay of animated projections (Chris Edser, Ailsa Paterson), music/sound (Peter Nelson), costume (Selene Cochrane’s witty expressions of character) and performance (directed by Rosemary Myers, co-creator along with Johnston and Reppe) is deliciously, spookily imaginative.
• Baba Yaga is one of the productions featuring in this week’s Edinburgh international children’s festival, which runs until Sunday 3 June
