Adelaide Festival. Windmill Theatre Company and Sandpit. Queen’s Theatre. 8 Mar 2023
I love young persons’ theatre, especially by Windmill. It’s always highly creative and it messages without pretension or angst – ie. it’s fun! You listen to the kids and the kids will listen to you.
This extraordinary production began as a thought bubble of Rosemary Myers, longtime creative leader at Windmill. She handballed it to playwright Lally Katz who roped in director Clare Watson. It got shaped through an iterative workshopping process, much of it with the cast. Easy peasy!
The original Hansel and Gretel is a Brothers Grimm tale of 1812, and grim it is. Many of the key features of the fable are present in Windmill’s version, but most are transmogrified.
This production contains everything titillating for school kids and is loaded with issues. The first gasp goes to Jonathon Oxlade’s incredible set comprising a gabled house with bespoke opaque or transparent walls on demand. The whole shebang rotates to hide or reveal whatever is necessary. We are introduced to a family comprising a Mum who doesn’t understand her daughter, a daughter looking forward to the formal with her bestie (she hopes for more than bestie actually), a younger brother (did he have a moustache?) and a Dad who tries to claw back some machismo command from a situation going pear-shaped.
Unlike most fictional families – Death of a Salesman or Long Day’s Journey Into Night comes to mind – this one sensibly opts for group therapy and thus we meet the most remarkable character. Gareth Davies plays a psycho-charlatan with aplomb. His conman of the subconscious is garbed like a guru and gabbles like Tony Robbins. Employing song, dance and performance skills, Davies concocts some absolutely magnetic wizardry.
There is nothing but other great performances and choreographic energy. The arrow of the narrative arc belongs to the adolescent female played by Temeka Lawlor with believable naturalism. The parents worked out by Jo Stone and Jim Smith are more purposefully cartoonish and their parents’ foibles are funny. The Hans character (Dylan Miller) is a great observer of and foil to the angst-driven daughter, and bestie Sim played by Emily Liu, well, what happened to her? The wolf people and the outside-the-gate idea were interesting threats but didn’t actually nudge the story much. And Grandpa is a wolf? Wonderfully whacky but useless.
Nothing is off the table here: drugs, sexual freedom, weirdness. The energy explodes into a climatic reveal of sci-fi horror rendered superbly by set design and frantic action. A nifty device is that the audience is issued with sound devices and earphones. A voice acts as narrator or subconscious, but it wasn’t used enough for either to be truly participatory. There is a short quiz before the show so that manipulative powers off stage can issue instructions to individuals about how they’ll participate in the performance. This was utterly fascinating.
A production not to be missed but you will miss it unless you are already booked. Every school in the world is going. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 3 to 12 Mar
Where: Queen’s Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
