A woodcutter and his wife live in a wintry forest. They long to have a child but have not been blessed. So they build themselves a daughter out of snow, clothe her, care for her and – miraculously – the little girl comes to life. Although the most immediate threat to this magical idyll can be summed up in a single word: spring.
Emma Reeves has based her story on a number of Russian folk tales, the best-known being the version collected by Arthur Ransome as The Little Daughter of the Snow. What they all have in common is a tendency to end in disaster. As a spirit of the breeze and a friend to foxes, bears and wolves, the Snow Child soon tires of the experiment with domesticity, leaving her adoptive parents even more bereft than before.
Reeves has a fine record for dramatising troubled children: she scripted the stage version of Jacqueline Wilson’s Hetty Feather. Her version of the tale, produced by Tutti Frutti, ends amicably – this is aimed at three to seven-year-olds after all – but nonetheless presents all the balances, compromises and sometimes downright unfairness of family life.
My niece Summer (who is five) is appalled by the bare-faced duplicity with which the parents, having granted the Snow Child’s request to feed a chicken to her friend the fox, chase the predator off with a dog instead. “You mustn’t break a promise,” she pronounces .“It’s the law”. But she’s not really in the right frame of mind for a demonstration of the cruel indifference of nature either – less than a month ago, her family’s own brood of hens was wiped out, so she’s pretty resistant to any form of pro-fox propaganda.
She responds more favourably to the simple charm of Wendy Harris’s production. “It was so wintry it made me shiver,” she says. “And I liked the broomsticks on their ends that looked like trees without their leaves”. And yet, despite being in the middle of the play’s suggested age-range, Summer, whose last theatrical experience was an amateur production of Oliver, is already beginning to feel short-changed by the time economies of children’s theatre. “Has it finished?” she asks as the house lights come up after an hour. Then she bursts into tears. Oh dear – was the business with the fox really that distressing? “No” she sniffs, “I was enjoying it. But there was no ice-cream break. And they didn’t change the scene.”
- On tour until 5 March 2016. Box office: 0113 388 0027.
