Grimms’ fairytales are full of bad parents – parents who are too greedy or feckless to look after their children, parents who are simply not there. But few are as monstrous as the Queen in Snow White, who develops such hatred for her only daughter that she plots her death.
Later versions of the tale cast the Queen as a stepmother – and a more acceptable version of wicked. But it’s the original version that Carol Ann Duffy and Liv Lorent use for their production, and they elaborate it into a cleverly nuanced story about the dangerous, distorting allure of youth and beauty. Their Queen is a doting mother whose love for Snow White only curdles into malevolence when her grownup daughter unwittingly starts to make her feel her age. It’s not pure wickedness that drives the Queen, but the terror of being old, ugly and alone.
As a family show, this production is excellent at layering complex emotions over a simple narrative. Duffy’s funny and chilling text (narrated by Lindsay Duncan) is direct but never patronising and is cunningly realised through the visual ingenuity of Phil Eddolls’ set, the atmospheric sound-painting of Murray Gold’s score and Lorent’s own vividly imagistic choreography.
Lorent makes beguiling use of her chorus of children, who tumble across the stage as Snow White’s childhood playmates and as an adorable menagerie of woodland creatures. But there’s plenty of darkness, too: the sinister, thrumming dance of the miners as they labour underground; the graphic goriness of the scene where the Huntsman extracts the heart from a baby deer and serves it to the Queen on a plate. Some of the pure dance material feels a little laboured and overlong, but otherwise this is an admirably fleet-footed show, as satisfying for adults as for kids.
- At Northern Stage, Newcastle upon Tyne, 31 March to 2 April. Box office: 0191-230 5151. At Oxford Playhouse, 8, 9 April. Box office: 01865 305305.
