Hansel and Gretel

I'm really sad to say that i was terribly disappointed by Kneehigh's production of Hansel and Gretel at the Southbank. I'm a huge fan of the Cornish theatre company, whose inventively interpretative productions of plays including Brief Encounter and A Matter of Life and Death have captured my heart and imagination in a way like few other plays over the last few years. Perhaps it was because this was most definitely for children, perhaps because i secretly wanted to be at a Christmas party across town, who knows, but the songs failed to excite and the story never seemed scaled the heights of innovative daring and surprise i was expecting, acrobatically flying between the familiar and fantastical with gravity-defying elegance as with former productions i've seen. I kept thinking it should have been like Told by an Idiot's production of Michel Faber's short story The Fahrenheit Twins, weird, wonderful, funny and deliciously dark, but it wasn't. sitting somewhere between awkward and deflating instead.

Still, i've booked tickets for Kneehigh's adaptation of Powell and Pressburger's classic film The Red Shoes, starring Moira Shearer, about a fatally passionate ballet dancer, which opens at the BAC in March. so fingers crossed that'll more than make up for this disappointment.