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Canberra Today 12°/15° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review: Playful escape to a fairytale

FAIRYTALES challenge traditional notions of intelligence, luck and authority with an irreverence that children love.

Kings and queens are stupid and unjust, the wild wood is a place of safety and the home is often a place of danger.

In an age of over-protection is great to experience a real fairytale, one that begins with a baby abandoned in the wood to be brought up by wolves and thieves. This tale’s happy ending includes not just a royal wedding and a vanquished dragon, but also plenty of wealthy travellers for the thieves to rob.

Serious Theatre and writer David Finnigan’s “Pea!” playfully references centuries of popular culture. Expanding from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea”, the story is narrated by the famous Pea who is now an exhibit in the Museum of Legendary Vegetables. The set is a castle, the windows of which become shadow puppet theatres, where intricate outdoor scenes are played out. A life-size puppet-queen is like a cartoon with comically expressive moving parts. The terrifying Dragon of One Nostril Snout vaporises and snorts its victims until it is defeated in a climactic fart joke.

Actors Cathy Pet?cz and Josh Wiseman play all the roles and also operate designer, Gillian Schwab’s stunning array of puppets. Director barb barnett’s whimsical and edgy style of hybrid physical theatre and puppetry lends itself perfectly to the fairytale world.

 

 

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