Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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by Kate Hennig, directed by Christine Brubaker
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
August 4-October 7, 2017;
Shea’s 710 Theatre, Buffalo, NY
October 27-28, 2017
The Happy Prince: “ There is no Mystery so great as Misery”
The Shaw Festival’s lunchtime show Wilde Tales by Kate Hennig is the first children’s show at either the Shaw or at Stratford to have been fully conceived with children in mind. It is not a ridiculized version of a 19th-century adventure story like Treasure Island now playing at Stratford, and it’s not a camped-up version of fairy-tale tropes as was Peter and the Starcatcher at the Shaw in 2015. Rather it retells four of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales from 1888 in language that children aged six years and older can understand and uses a wide range of highly theatrical techniques to engage them in the action.
Hennig has taken four of the five stories that Oscar Wilde published as The Happy Prince and Other Tales to create her 55-minute-long play. Because the stories are not interconnected, Hennig gives her play unity by telling the story “The Remarkable Rocket” in sections interleaved with the other three tales. The play begins with a gathering of various fireworks all excited that they will be set off to celebrate the wedding of a prince and princess. One of them, Rocket (Sanjay Talwar), thinks he is the best of them all and makes fun of the others. When accused of insensitivity, he weeps to prove he not insensitive. this, however, makes him damp and he fails to catch fire. For this he is thrown in a ditch as useless. The Rocket, however, is so egocentric he construes this a positive. Subsequent visits to him by a Frog, a Dragonfly and a Duck serves as interludes between the following stories.
After a comic interlude with the Rocket and a Frog (Jonathan Tan) to lighten the mood, the show moves to the next story, “The Selfish Giant”. Here we meet the Giant (Kelly Wong) who own a beautiful garden. In the Giant’s absence, children have taken to playing there, but when the Giant’s shoos them away and builds a wall around the garden to keep the children out, perpetual winter descends upon it. When one Little Boy (Sanjay Talwar) leads the children to find a way through the wall, spring comes again and the Giant’s realizes his mistake. This story ends in the deaths of the Giant and the Boy.
After another comic interlude, this time between the Rocket and a Dragonfly (P.J. Prudat), Hennig shifts to the story of “The Nightingale and the Rose”. Here a Student (Jonathan Tan) is angry that the girl he loves will not go out with him unless he gives her a red rose. A Nightingale (Emily Lukasik) overhears this and goes to visit a Rose-Tree (Sanjay Talwar) who, unfortunately produces only white roses. He tells the Nightingale that there is a way to produce a red rose but it is very painful. The bird must press her breast against a thorn and sing her sweetest song while her blood colours a rose. The Nightingale dies trying to help the Student, but the Student’s beloved rejects the rose and the Student casts it away. The show finishes with a visit by a mother Duck (Marion Day) to the Rocket and his successful launch.
All six actors give lovely performances both unaided and using puppets. Sanjay Talwar has a chance to show his gift for comedy. Marion Day has a chance to reveal a much more sombre side. And Kelly Wong is moving as the Giant, who feels so sorry for the selfishness that deprived him and children so long of happiness. Nevertheless, the real star of the show is its design. Camellia Koo has created a wall separating the thrust playing area of the Court House Theatre from the cyclorama of the the theatre’s back wall. Here she has installed beautifully decorated gates, painted by Gwyneth Stark, looking like an illustration from a Victorian children’s book, that are turned to create a new background for each of the stories. Koo has come up with fantastic costumes for all the actors dressed as fireworks and Christine Brubaker’s direction has them all go off in comically varied ways.
Perhaps the most imaginative prop of all is a trunk used in “The Happy Prince” that is like a pop-up book when opened. Each of the scenes of sadness the Prince witnesses are played by small puppets on the new sets that appear when a page is turned upwards into the trunk’s lid.
Brubaker has also integrated children into the action. Parents can sign up their children aged 6 to 12 in advance for a pre-show workshop with actors 60 minutes before the performance. During the show the children sit on pillows in the front row and have various tasks to perform. These include singing a song about the Remarkable Rocket, ringing bells, holding up flowers and being called on to help with chores on stage. Not only is this fun for the children, although they have to watch for cues from the actors, but it is fun for the adults to see the children involved.
While Wilde once said, “It is the duty of every father to write fairytales for his children”, he published his tales when his two sons were too young ever to have heard them. As the summaries above show, all four stories have a very dark side. What is the destiny of a firework anyway, but to explode and die? The main characters of the other three stories also all die and, except in “The Selfish Giant” are forgotten.
Strangely enough, after the initial fun of the first part of “The Remarkable Rocket”, the children sitting around the stage were less engaged by the following parts of that story but riveted by what adults might think of as the much sadder stories that follow, perhaps sensing that more serious issues are involved. Hennig has lightened up some stories and removed some of Wilde’s heavily Christian imagery. The story of “The Remarkable Rocket” does not have the depressing ending of the original and the Little Boy in “The Selfish Giant” is not identified as the Christ Child.
While children can get caught up in all the action and theatrical transformations involved in telling these four fairy tales, adults will be left to ponder Wilde’s subtle way of preparing children for the injustice and unfairness of the world through stories like these. Hennig borrows freely in her dialogue from other works by Wilde and gives the Rocket the famous line from Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”. The children did not seem very interested in the gutter when the Rocket was lying in it, but they were all quite enthusiastically looking up at the stars on stage and excited to participate.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Sanjay Talwar as Remarkable Rocket, Kelly Wong as Roman Candle, Emily Lukasik as Squib, Marion Day as Catherine Wheel and Jonathan Tan as Worker; Kelly Wong as Swallow and Marion Day as the Happy Prince; P.J. Prudat as Belle, Sanjay Talwar as Little Boy, Marion Day as Peach Tree, Emily Lukasik as Cherry Tree and Kelly Wong as the Selfish Giant with young assistants from the audience. ©2017 David Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com or www.sheas.org/710main.
2017-09-06
Wilde Tales