15 December 2015.
Snow White and Rose Red, one of the lesser known fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm, has two sisters as the heroes, making it a natural choice for RashDash. The result is entertaining, brilliant and feminist alternative panto.
In the original story, the sisters welcome a friendly bear into their home and do kind deeds for an evil dwarf who curses them even though they have helped him. Snow White falls in love with the bear, who turns out to be a man enspelled by the dwarf.
The design by Lucy Sierra combines dreamy fairy tale atmosphere with interestingly naked stagecraft. The narrator, the Snow Angel, is beautifully played by Becky Wilkie with an ancient-feeling storytelling cadence in her voice that effectively conjures up this magical world. She stands on a platform constructed of bare scaffolding, the poles artfully arranged into arcs and whirls around her. As the show begins, she is surrounded by mist and sings a haunting melody about ‘a place where snow always falls, and the light can’t breathe…’, while looking into a large, clear glass ball, filled with mysterious looking light. It feels incongruous, but it also works, spinning the ancient and modern into each other.
RashDash – theatre makers Helen Goalen and Abbi Greenland – play the two sisters, young women living happily together in Bluebell Cottage, with its green Chesterfield chair, colourful circular rag rug, warm fire and collection of storybooks, watched over by the Snow Angel.
One day they discover a new storybook in their cottage, about a small town high up in the mountains which is buried one day in an avalanche. The town’s only survivor is Graham, a Very Small Man with a Very Long Beard. When he discovers the deaths of his family and community, his heart freezes, and he goes searching for other people to make as miserable as he is.
This show doesn’t pull any punches in its depiction of this tragedy, and the dark thread of this other story runs importantly through the show and is woven into the larger story’s resolution. Of course Graham is the evil dwarf of the original fairy tale, and RashDash’s production amplifies his backstory in order to trace the psychological origins of dark human behaviour. As the sisters contemplate the blank pages at the end of the book and realise the story is unfinished, a knock comes at the door. It’s a bear, and the rest of the story unfolds, with ensuing romance and adventure.
As in the original fairy tale, the two sisters represent different aspects of femininity: Goalen’s Snow White is a gentle, whimsical daydreamer, and Greenland’s Rose Red is brash, physical, and loud, dressed in a mini-tartan kilt, zebra pattern leggings and red roses in high-up alt-girl hair bunches. They are both rambunctious, strong, brave, and kind, and their femininity is thoughtfully presented as multi-faceted and valuable: Snow White’s gentleness sits alongside her bravery, and Rose Red’s physicality sits alongside her deeply felt emotions.
The show is stuffed full of delights: bawdy jokes, excellent songs (including a Joan Jett-esque rock number about danger by Rose Red), shadow puppetry, and perfectly tuned performances from the entire company, which also includes Tom Penn as a charming, urbane Bear, who has ‘a predilection for flowery notes in [his] tea’ and a beautiful singing voice, and Ed Wren as the Very Small Man, who had us rolling in the aisles, practically, with his effete, posh, evil cringing and spluttering, and hilariously lush hip action during the twerking section of the rap song. The show is so well-written that the bright bursts of brilliant wordplay, which were delightful surprises at first, felt normalised by the end, like having a firework display that keeps going for two hours.
But what I loved most about this show was the way it wove its modern moral fabric out of the old story: women are heroes, love may appear in contours that surprise us, and being loving in response to hate is the only way to heal the darkness in the world.
Originally published in Exeunt Magazine on 15 December 2015.
