This year’s Manchester international festival has made striking tilts at fairytale and myths. Maxine Peake’s Skriker was an eldritch visitor from the underworld; in Performance Capture, Ed Atkins can be seen making avatars by melding images of people connected to the festival. Now Douglas Gordon, designer and director, quizzes Little Red Riding Hood in a good-looking show that is part installation, part concert, part reading. The pianist Hélène Grimaud dextrously plays Bach, Eno, Ravel, Schumann and others. Charlotte Rampling speaks with rapt restraint a narrative by Veronica Gonzalez Peña. There is a good-looking wolf, which lies in a snowy puddle at the front of the stage.
Each element is held up for regard as if it were being auctioned. There is no dynamism, no story – visual or verbal – that holds them together. This is not drama but drapery. The wolf, the sexy beast, looks like a pyjama case.
Neck of the Woods begins with hints that savagery and sex are about to follow: in the darkness (apart from the screen of a mobile phone gleaming from an open bag), the sound of an axe hitting a tree is punctuated by big male grunts. It quickly fades into good taste. Rampling recites Little Red Riding Hood, and a dodgy father-and-daughter history, in a reverberating, deliberate whisper. Whenever the writer Gonzalez Peña wants to emphasise something she says it twice: “It did not stop. It did not stop.” Would that it did. In the background the ingeniously disguised Sacred Sounds Women’s Choir wave and susurrate to simulate a forest. Snowflakes fall. Rampling’s hands, streaming with red ribbons, massage the air while Grimaud plays Rachmaninov. “Let’s not be scared,” a huntsman whispers to a young girl. There’s not much danger of that.
