Bread Crumbs

Ruby Johnston and Benjamin Nichol burst onto the stage as Gretel and Hansel, dressed in picture book garb.  Within seconds they shift the familiar fairy tale into different territory and a different time.  The language is contemporary – and it’s not that of ‘innocent’ children.  They’re not lost in a forest, exactly, but they’re lost.  Or are they?  They are traversing some outer-urban landscape – a mall is mentioned, some waste ground… 

So, are they lost?  Or fleeing something – or someone?  Can they go home?  It’s ambiguous – and quite deliberately so.  They seem to have escaped some never-quite-spelled out trauma or abuse – although Gretel is laying a trail of bread crumbs so that they can fine their way home… (In the original, the children are abandoned in the woods by their mother – later amended to stepmother – because there is simply not enough to eat.) 

What’s immediately clear is the way Johnston and Nichol subvert gender roles and the mythical stereotypes.  Gretel is clearly the leader: strong, rational, resentfully responsible for her brother and aware of their real situation.  Hansel is either the spoiled younger sibling or simply a male: feckless, whiney, but happily dependent on his sister – and seemingly unaware of what they might be fleeing.  Trailing behind her, he eats the breadcrumbs.  When they find the gingerbread house, Hansel is seduced, but Gretel resists…  She is waiting for a Handsome Prince – a surprising reveal that shows that that myth has her in its grip and undercuts her strength and independence.

The tale shifts again and plays with the tropes of both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.  When Prince Charming shows up, Johnston and Nichol take gender roles and stereotypes somewhere else… Beware of what you dream of.  Prince Charming a.k.a. Handsome Prince, hunka-spunk as he might be, is also a man.  Happily ever after?  Not at all what Johnston and Nichol have to say. 

Ruby Johnston’s performance is most impressive.  She manages to look exactly like a fairy tale heroine and to be strong, grumpy, troubled and temporarily romantic.  When her Gretel reveals her Handsome Prince dream, we feel, well, disappointed.  Benjamin Nichol, meanwhile, gives us that irritating, unlikeable Hansel, but also the suave and over-confident Prince, bringing some satiric humour to things.  Both performances are finely judged to serve the import of the text.

The open playing space – audience on both sides – is elegantly and suggestively designed by Joseph Noonan, who’s also responsible for the memory-evoking costumes.  Mr Noonan has the confidence to be abstract and suggestive rather than state his contribution in literal fashion to this intelligent chamber piece.  The gingerbread house is a miniature, inside a clear Perspex box – and the box is also a seat and a platform – and of course, Snow White’s glass coffin.  Internally lit frames are embedded in the stage: they lift up to become ladders, columns, shelter or a grave.  The lighting by Rachel Lee meets the challenge beautifully and atmospherically of the stage being open on both sides.  Sidney Miller’s sound design is both subtle and witty. 

Bread Crumbs is a tight and focussed 55 minutes – sharply intelligent and realised with disciplined skill.  It knows what it is about and it says it with clarity.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Pippa Samaya