Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen is a story of frozen wastes and arctic sun, of glittering ice palaces and snow that never melts. It's a story that comes in all shades of white - which is why the first thing to say about Andrey Bartenev's Snow Queen installation is that it's so brightly coloured it hurts the eye.
Bartenev's huge, fantastical figures, (freely) inspired by Andersen's tale, are constructed out of every kind of late 20th-century junk - cardboard packets, postcards, broken toys, and litter - and they come in vibrantly acrylic blues, lime greens, neon pinks, silver and gold. The images they recall are also closer to fairgrounds and carnivals than to the frozen north. Gerda is a squat surreal figure whose belly moves round and round like a carousel, Kay is a papier-mache giant, the Snow Queen is assembled out of rows of dolls heads while a Frozen Man is hung around with a suit of plastic bottles .
These freestanding figures form the scenery around which Aletta Collins's choreographed version of the story is performed. Her six dancers are themselves moving sculptures - their Bauhaus-style costumes more like abstract forms than human dress. A chorus of flowers and goblins come in Ski Yoghurt wrappings with orange cones on their heads, the Snow Queen sports a gothic armour of blue and gold plastic, and her opponent, the Sun Queen, radiates green and gold spheres from various limbs. Kay and Gerda are a pair of comical inanimate figures over whom the two queens and their cohorts briefly battle with futuristic war machines.
Collins's choreography, within the limits of the costumes, falls in step with the anarchic spirit of Bartenev's installation. The constructivist formations of the chorus are disrupted by some deftly jolly pratfalls, the queens move with the stilted grace of clockwork ballerinas, and the whole thing is whisked along by Oleg Kostrov's musical fusion of spacey melodies and funked up Prokofiev.
The event is billed as a family show (admission is free). Yet while adults may be charmed by its outrageous vibrancy and art history pedigree, children, literalist souls that they are, may have trouble. Neither Bartenev nor Collins evoke the story as it was written, nor actually, much of a story at all. My own kids and their friends had no idea who the Snow Queen was, and complained "they didn't get what most of it meant". As aficianados of the art of junk modelling they were deeply impressed by the cleverness of the designs. But as theatre-goers they felt they'd been had.
Box office: 0171 960 4242. Until January 1
