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Ill-conceived and overly worthy, this attempt to attract families to Shakespeare’s Globe with a refugee-themed take on a fairytale is tough-going. Take your kids to something more fun this Christmas.Summary
Rating
Ok
“Welcome home, kids. Your dad’s dead.” I am paraphrasing a little, but for a moment, I genuinely thought this was how The Globe’s 2024 Christmas show would end: an uneasy mix of children’s festive fairytale and cold, hard adult truth. As I type, I realise this might well appeal to the small subset of parents who don’t ‘do’ Christmas. You know, the type who don hair shirts, decry commercialisation, and disapprove of traditional panto politics. Why have fun when you can salve your middle-class conscience about the treatment of Ukrainian refugees again this year? If that’s your Boden bag, go for it. For the rest of us, there are countless other ways to spend your hard-earned cash and genuinely treat your kids this Christmas.
Simon Armitage, Britain’s poet laureate (for adults, note) and celebrated Shakespearean director Nick Bagnall have thrown their undeniable talents at Hansel and Gretel back, and I’m told reworked, from last year. They seem to have tried a bit of everything except perhaps doing the obvious and aiming the material squarely at children. Armitage writes beautifully, as you’d expect, but not theatrically. He lists and rhymes species of British woodland tree as well as the next guy, but it doesn’t half slow down the action. I found myself guiltily checking my watch when he repeated the same trick with bird species, counting myself lucky I didn’t have youngsters to keep entertained in the cavernous, cold space that is the Globe on a December night. Many parents did, of course, and you could occasionally hear the struggle.
There must be good news, I hear you say. There is a brief respite from the gloom in the form of an entertainingly northern witch-come-people-trafficker and chorus of, I think, foxes. They whizz through some strong choreography and rap passionately about the joys of sugar. Yum Yum. Slurp Slurp. It’s as light-weight and silly as it sounds, but that’s what we want for Christmas sometimes, right? Parents get to laugh at old penny-sweet references (Yes, I had totally forgotten about foam prawns!), and everyone cheers when the witch gets her comeuppance. It’s all briefly like a proper panto. This goodwill, however, is frittered away shortly afterwards by the bewildering appearance of a wilting, cheap-looking inflatable swan, which so clumsily and crassly represents the small boats crossing the channel as to be insulting. Real kids are drowning. Is a song and dance about it strictly necessary?
There are a handful of original songs, none of which drive the plot forward, and most outstay their welcome. We hear about a panic attack, for example, in a song called ‘Panic Attack’, which repeats the phrase panic attack for an interminable length of time. Impressively, especially given the inevitable press night downpour, the central pairing of Ned Costello (Hansel) and Yasemin Ӧzdemir (Gretel) have the energy to power on through, regardless of the material. The rain didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of their fellow cast members or the on-stage musicians either. Narrator Jenni Maitland leads us through the action, getting her tongue around Armitage’s dense text and singing powerfully throughout. Beverly Rudd deserves extra plaudits for doubling as the titular characters’ tragedy-struck mother and the aforementioned funky witch with skill.
Spoiler alert. Dad doesn’t die. He returns from an unnamed warzone seemingly unharmed in the nick of time for the final song. It’s a shameless plot twist appropriate for a show that doesn’t, it seems, want your kids to have too much fun this Christmas.
Written by: Simon Armitage
Directed by: Nick Bagnall
Associate Director: Cory Hippolyte
Co-Composed / Orchestration by: Magnus Mehta
Co-Composed / Songs by: Patrick Pearson
Co-Designed by: William Fricker
Movement Direction by: Chi-San Howard
Voice Coach by: Liz Flint
Hansel and Gretel plays at Shakespeare’s Globe until 5 January. Further information and booking details can be found here.
