Dance
Hansel & Gretel
Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Mary Brennan
five stars
SCOTTISH Ballet’s entire year has been marked by a series of bold, risk-taking initiatives, from David Dawson’s radical take on Swan Lake to the bravura extremes of a Preljocaj/Pite double bill for the Edinburgh Festival. Their Christmas offering carries that impetus to an appropriately thrilling (and Grimm) conclusion.
In reviving Hansel & Gretel (from 2013), the company’s artistic director Christopher Hampson has been able to burnish his earlier choreography, ensuring – as Humperdinck’s lush score provides lollipops of its own – that the cautionary tale reaches out from its heart of darkness with a dramatic immediacy that transcends folk-lore fantasy. Yes, this ballet says, Hansel & Gretel do fall prey to “stranger danger”, but the vulnerability that delivered them into the candy-toting clutches of the Witch crept in because of parental indifference at home.
This is genuinely shocking territory but Hampson is adept at balancing light and shade throughout his ballet. He engineers merrily black comedy out of the fag-smoking, beer-swilling Mum and Dad. As for the Witch, abandoning her initial aura of beguiling glamour, she takes on a kind of cartoonish grotesquerie that seems merely eccentric until she deprives Hansel of both his beloved teddy-bear and his liberty. Araminta Wraith’s transformation from floaty fairy elegance on pointe, to hunched-up, beetling crone in baffies is done before our very eyes. Scary? Admirably so. And because Bethany Kingsley-Garner (Gretel) and Andrew Peasgood (Hansel) have brought such believably childish strops to the sibling’s relationship, we have truly come to fear for them. Is Hampson going to give them a happy ending?
The closing moments are not just full of joy but, like much of Hampson’s resolute story-telling, they opt for a real-life simplicity over spectacle - ensemble opulence, however, is given delicious licks in a gorgeously-staged dream sequence. The darkly forbidding forest responds to the children’s inner yearning with a magical banquet and Mum (Marge Hendrick) and Dad (Evan Loudon) appear in a swishly, romantic duet – just one of the cleverly choreographed delights in a dazzling seasonal treat that shows off the entire company at its versatile best.
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