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TASTY TALE
Four stars
"Delicious moments...fashioned into a rhyming feast"
TIME OUT
HOOD IN THE WOOD
THE GUARDIAN: Four stars
Noel Greig's
pungent retelling of Little Red Riding Hood takes you deep into the
woods and snares you in the thickets of the imagination. It gets the
balance of nasty and nice, scary and safe, just right.
This is a show about fear and
stereotyping, the path we all have to take to get through the woods and
how sometimes we have to find the wild side of our nature in order to
survive. Its final images owe something to the seductive hairiness of
Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber - not bad for a show aimed at seven-
to 11-year-olds.
Greig and the director, David
Johnston, constantly subvert expectations in a show where the spit and
poetry of the writing is cleverly given extra layers by Lewis Gibson's
live music and sound accompaniment.
Here, the tamed, urban world is at odds with nature, and it only
gradually emerges why Little Hood's mother is an uptight
obsessive-compulsive, estranged from her wild, wandering mother who
lives far away in the woods.
Played out on a bare stage with just
four blood-red chairs, this simple piece of storytelling becomes
emotionally, psychologically and theatrically sophisticated, largely due
to Gibson's sound-effects contributions. He offers everything from the
deadening tick-tock of Little Hood's home to the bubbling burps of the
interior of the wolf's stomach, where, Jonah-like, Little Hood and
Granny find themselves.
Gary Lagden gives a tour-de-force
performance, playing mother, child, granny and wolf with verve; he has
the trick of reaching out to the audience to both scare and settle them.
This is a
first-rate piece of storytelling that will make children squeal with
terrified delight and parents shiver with recognition.·
Until February 3. Unicorn Box office: 0207645 0560
"Gary singlehandedly produces a compelling
cast...accompanied by Lewis and his battery of unorthodox instruments...an inspired piece of audience participation"
TIME OUT -
2006 Critics Choice
"An atmospheric,
psychological retelling, with just the right amount of menace"
THE STAGE
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