7 days to the Hansel premiere!

The story of Hansel and Gretel is so widely known that the plot doesn’t need any introduction. Director Richard Jones, who originally conceived his production for Welsh National Opera several years ago, became familiar with it very early in his life: “Hansel and Gretel was one of the first pieces of theatre I ever saw as a child,” he remembers. “I got taken by my mum and dad to see it, and I do remember it vividly. I can remember as a child making many drawings of it—the Witch’s cottage and the cage in which Hansel was imprisoned. In the production, there’s actually one quote from something that I saw as a child, at the end of Act I.”

In Jones’s view, the piece is all about food, and the lack of it. “And it’s about people consuming other people,” the director explains. “Or people consuming other people’s territory. Elbowing each other out. It’s got images of cuckoos in it and creatures taking over other creatures’ nests. Which is what ultimately the children do with the Witch.” To emphasize the food theme, each of the three acts is set in a kitchen. “From the beginning,” Jones says, “I wanted to do the piece in three styles. So the first style is very realistic, for the children’s house. Like a D.H. Lawrence play at the Royal Court Theatre, or any number of plays you could see here in New York. The second style is a German expressionist style, like Wedekind’s Spring Awakening. And the third style is for the Witch’s kitchen, which is Theatre of the Absurd. It was very much inspired again by something I saw as child. Every year I used to get taken to a pantomime at the London Palladium, and in each of these pantomimes there was always a thing called a Slop Scene where food was thrown about, or people got very messy. I think a lot of memories of seeing those scenes in the pantomimes went into the production of Hansel and Gretel.” Is it still a children’s story? “Oh,” says Jones, “I think it’s a feast for a child really. It’s got lots of very scary things in it. And lots of very sweet things.”

This entry was posted by Philipp Brieler on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 7:42 am and is filed under New Production Countdown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.