Rapunzel
Rapunzel
Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Mary Brennan
'Once upon a time...' In balletLORENT's dance-drama version of Rapunzel, that familiar phrase introduces a tale of longing and loss that resonates just as profoundly now.
Two childless women so hunger for a baby, their obsession colours every aspect of their days. Their paths cross when the doting husband, driven by his wife's pregnant cravings, is caught stealing rampion from the spinster-witch's garden: she exacts a terrible penalty - the couple's child, Rapunzel. What follows - Rapunzel's captivity, her fabled tresses, her prince and their fate - is nowadays the stuff of cartoon animations.
But choreographer Liv Lorent and her creative team have book-ended that core imagery with a meaningful context. One that embraces Rapunzel's desolate parents as well as her own fulfilled future and puts appropriately harrowing flesh on those Grimm bones.
It begins beguilingly with May Day frolics where (locally recruited) youngsters join in the merry dance and the mood - echoed in Murray Gold's music - is of sap rising, optimistically. But as Carol Ann Duffy's spare, yet poetic text unfolds - in a voice-over by Lesley Sharp - the darkness closes in. So too do the wrought-iron screens (designed by Phil Eddolls), and so do the shadows in Gold's orchestrations. Lorent's movement takes her dancers - and audiences, young and old - into the emotional heart of deprivation, through the abject wrenching of the bereft mother and the rebellious stomping of an adolescent Rapunzel who is soon climbing the walls (literally) of her metal-work tower.
It's a vivid, fiercely beautiful vision of love in many forms - destructive and possessive, as well as redemptive. And the sheer unstinting energy, and athletic finesse, of the dancers ensures we feel, as well as see, the humanity and heartache that makes Rapunzel timeless.
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