Hints and tips:
...Nicholls’s skilful, sprightly retelling of the Brothers Grimm fairytale is enriched by Sardà’s superbly moody woodcut-style artwork....
...Making Katurian a woman in Matthew Dunster’s production subtly changes the dynamic....
...The one female team-member (the very droll Sinéad Matthews) eats only eggs and apples (both foods that appear in creation stories). Where are we exactly?...
...The first half, Stepmother, is a mash-up of familiar tales gathered by the Grimms and others: Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel....
...The woodlands that have been allowed to remain as parks between Mohe City’s neighbourhoods evoke of the enveloping darkness of a Brothers Grimm fairytale....
...Anna Tsygankova was an agreeable Cinderella and Matthew Golding her Prince, properly equipped with big jumps....
...As Hough points out: “Alice works on so many levels, like the fables of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen....
...With the use of gauzes, film and set designs (by Kai Fischer) a front room with couch and telly can suddenly be fringed by a forest of Grimm-like ominousness....
...Henry set out, like a father in a Grimm fairy tale, to find the object desired by his sickly son, whose life he believes will be saved by it....
...The disguised wicked witch and her child victims are in the great tradition of domestic malaise, of normality menaced by the dark outsider, from Grimm and Struwwelpeter to Edward Gorey and Lemony Snicket...
...The tales of the brothers Grimm are nothing if not dark, and this production promises not to lighten the tone....
...Sweetness and shadow stipple Matthew Bourne’s reupholstered classic ballets, such as his feral Swan Lake and sugar-rush Nutcracker. Both have packed people in at London’s Sadler’s Wells....
International Edition