NEWCASTLE PLAYWRIGHT VANESSA BATES ‘THE MAGIC HOUR’ AT THE CIVIC PLAYHOUSE : MAGICAL

Amy Vee, Louise Chapman, Jan Hunt

The Brothers Grimm – Jacob and Wilhem were the two German academics responsible for collecting folk tales during the early to mid-19th century and publishing them. Some they embellished, some they censored a little if a bit too sexy or overly gory, and for most the language was polished to make them more stylistically similar.

The “woods “were a common theme – a place of wild away from civilisation, the village or town, where wolves would roam, princesses and children abandoned, and witches and other outcasts and creatures lived.  It was a time when discipline relied on fear and children needed to be warned to be careful.

Their legacy is huge; there would be few children who haven’t been exposed to Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Rapunzel, to name a few. Their collection has massive representation in Disney films, and has inspired innumerable other theatrical productions and works of art.

Such timelessness and adaptability of the collection speaks to the universal themes and how readily they can be adapted to create a familiar scaffold for telling of more contemporary and relevant cautionary tales, frequently gloomy and forbidding ones.

Newcastle based award winning playwright Vanessa Bates has taken Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, The Frog Prince, Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk and shifted the focus on to the marginalised women of the stories; the grandmother, one of the ugly stepsisters, the wife of the King, the adopting mother of Rapunzel and Jack’s mother.

The set is a contemporary wood – the outcasts of urban living, the homeless, with rubbish bins, some debris, a ladder, and an outdoor cooking set up where some pumpkin soup is being prepared. The singer (Amy Vee) enters and is greeted by Actor 1 (Jan Hunt) and invited to stay for some pumpkin soup. Actor 2 (Louise Chapman) emerges from the rubbish, and we are informed that it is

Last run at backyard cricket, last jump at elastics, last bit of telly hour … Magic hour, sunset hour, nearly time for story hour.

Louise Chapman, who was also the producer with Lulu Bell Productions, and Jan Hunt are two highly skilled and talented actors, who, along with the beautiful musicianship and  vocals of Amy Vee took the audience on an evocative and magical journey that involved cautionary tales of dysfunctional families, runaway children, drug abuse, domestic violence, infidelity, gluttony and ignorance, and the grind of living, loving and trying to survive.

It was serious, occasionally gloomy, some characters were very unattractive, and the messages were forbidding. It’s a reminder of how hard it is for many people, particularly women, to keep a family together, to keep themselves together.

Jan and Louise as Actor 1 and Actor 2, take turns to lead the stories, jumping effortlessly into a multiplicity of major and minor characters with masterful transformational ease.  Jan’s ugly and not terribly bright stepsister was a comic delight, and her portrayal of Jack’s mother, a woman with addiction issues who is trying so hard to stay clean and be honest, is a heart breaker.

Louise shocked right from the start with her sexually potent grandmother in the Red Riding Hood adaptation.

“I was eighteen when I had her mum- she was sixteen when she had her. Still got the figure, don’t let myself get fat”.

This is no run of the mill little old lady with knitting in her hands and her actions at the end of that tale are confronting.

Amy Vee’s singer was reminiscent of the wandering minstrel who listens to tales and creates songs. She occasionally interacted with the characters while also creating a soundtrack on her guitar and a keyboard, underscoring the words and actions and completing each story with a sung verse, a symbolic comment on the tale.

Vanessa Bates also directed this production and it’s a tight, layered and textured show, with some clever and engaging variations. The use of stuffed toys, an oversized Kermit and a Pig, for the adapted retelling of the Frog Prince was a lighthearted and fun approach, plus a timely reminder that many of these stories were originally for children.

There’s also a lightness at the end of the gloom, as another award winner, lighting designer Lyndon Buckley, created a beautiful magic world of light, a reminder that there is still joy, love and hope in amongst all the messy hardship and troubled relationships.

THE MAGIC HOUR was playing at the Civic Playhouse, Hunter Street, Newcastle from November 21 – 30 2024 as part of the Upstage at the Playhouse program, an initiative, which has been developed by the Civic Theatre for the City of Newcastle. In its second year, the four-month long program aims to give opportunities for fresh, new and adapted works to be presented and performed by local artists. All the UpStage productions have been written or re-adapted by Newcastle playwrights.

This production is imminently reproducible, and one feels that we will be seeing THE MAGIC HOUR by Vanessa Bates again.

Jan Hunt

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