Liv Lorent founded BalletLorent 25 years ago, and in 2014 was awarded an MBE for services to dance. Her latest piece is Rumpelstiltskin. It’s aimed at children, but adults with a taste for antic fun will find much to enjoy. This version of the brothers Grimm fairy story was written by the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and is narrated here by Ben Crompton. It’s not as dark as the original, which contains threats of beheading and a vengeful imp who tears himself in half, but it is oddly suggestive. “So whose was the baby?” people were asking on the way out. More of the baby later.
Duffy’s plot gives us a dying queen (Virginia Scudeletti) and a distraught king (John Kendall) who, in his grief, neglects his son (Gavin Coward), so that the boy grows up “strange and awkward and unloved”. Meanwhile, everyone’s trying to cheer the king up, and a foolhardy shepherd (Toby Fitzgibbons) blurts out that his teenage daughter (Natalie Trewinnard) can spin straw into gold. The king decides to put this claim to the test, and the unhappy girl, who of course can’t do any such thing, is led to a room filled with straw and presented with a spinning wheel.
Lorent fills her stage with larky and simplistic movement, and characters whose behaviour veers between the witty and the fey. Trewinnard shines, and invests her dancing with real character. Michele Clapton’s costume designs – fantastical creations of fabrics and feathers – have a whimsical, neo-hippy look to them. There are apple-cheeked oldsters, frisky adolescents, and a scene-stealing flock of improbably long-legged sheep who leap like fleas, totter on pointe, and face the prospect of slaughter en masse if the shepherd’s daughter can’t deliver the gold.
Duffy’s storytelling, and a jaunty and eclectic score by composer Murray Gold, ensure that the whole thing bowls along at a fair pace. But I suspect that few of the children present understand what a spinning wheel is, or does. There’s a theory that spinning wheels are central to fairy tales such as Rumpelstiltskin, The Wild Swans and Sleeping Beauty because the tales were originally devised and told by women to alleviate the mind-numbing boredom of spinning. Maybe, but today they’re obscure objects, and Lorent’s cast appear to have no idea how they work.
The plot is really quite odd. When the shepherd’s daughter has spun the straw into gold with the help of Rumpelstiltskin – in this version the king’s son – the widowed king is so delighted that he marries her (yes children, the patriarchy). Nine months later she gives birth to a son whose father, in the final words of the story, is identified as Rumpelstiltskin. Logically, this means that Rumpelstiltskin has adulterously, and possibly magically, fathered his own half-brother, which is quite a twist, and will surely make for enthralling classroom discussions.
