Snow White - Northern Arts Review
BalletLORENT at the The Leeds Playhouse
balletLORENT's Snow White - Northern Arts Review
When I was a kid, the other children watched Disney films and rooted for characters like Ariel and Jasmine. I rooted for Ursula and Maleficent. I wanted to be the witch. To offer up the poisoned apple. And there was a particular quality to older children’s films that intuitively understood this need to explore the darkness. Lighting would shift, shadows would become deeper and you knew that something scary was about to happen. And the films let it. They didn’t shy away from those darker instincts. Over time, much family-friendly programming has lost that edge—that bite—that helps children explore the scary things in life (and live to tell the tale). It has become bland and safe, showing a careless disrespect for the resilience of childhood and the proving ground of make-believe that helps us learn to fight what lurks in the hidden corners. So, when I walked into Leeds Playhouse surrounded by children in their sparkly finest, I prepared myself for a pleasantly predictable, if not slightly bland, experience. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
balletLORENT is a Newcastle-based dance theatre company founded by artistic director Liv Lorent MBE in 1993, and this Snow White is the second instalment in a fairytale trilogy made with former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. It’s a significant reworking of their 2015/16 original, first commissioned by Sadler’s Wells.
Duffy’s retelling abandons the tired stepmother trope and most of what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. The dwarves are gone, replaced by miners who live below the palace and keep the queen’s world running at considerable cost to themselves. Snow White’s adversary is her mother, a queen so consumed by fear of ageing that she sends a younger portrait of herself to a neighbouring king as a kind of introduction—a fairy catfish, playing neatly into the patriarchal structures that tell her that age is a curse and not a privilege. When the king arrives and assumes the portrait was of Snow White and not her mother, his affections are sealed. No matter how hard Snow White rebuffs his advances, the queen can never compete with the perceived beauty of a younger woman, even when that woman is her daughter. Soon the story begins to move towards darkness with speed and purpose.
I have to admit that narrated ballet is not my usual preference. I like unpicking a story through movement alone and watching how the form shapes the storytelling. But this telling of the classic fairytale has invented enough of its own unique structure that narration genuinely earns its keep, and Carol Ann Duffy’s text is delivered by Sarah Parish with a real storyteller’s cadence that felt fireside-ready. For some of the youngest children in the audience, who would struggle with a programme synopsis, it pulled the story forward in a way that kept them tethered to the action.
To see my full review, please visit Northern Arts Review
See you in the shadows my loves,
Sean x
