THE SNOW QUEEN
‘The Snow Queen’ is a story to melt the heart. The Junction’s Christmas show via streamed performance, takes the story by Hans Christian Andersen, fillets it down to bare essentials and delivers a satisfyingly 50 minutes of magic and fun. The production, devised by the cast eschews the Danish storyteller’s Christological subtext: faith and prayer can warm an icy heart that sees only the bad and the ugly in the world. Adrift from its moral moorings, the narrative does lose something in the translation and the onward trajectory of the story gets a bit overcooked by visual trickery and the children in all of us will wonder who exactly that elusive Snow Queen might be.
In the original, a nasty troll (aka the Devil) has showered the world with fragments of his distorted mirror which gets into the eyes and worms its way down to the heart turning nice children into nasty, vindictive ones. Our child hero Kai has sadly been a victim of a malevolent shard and has subsequently turned from nice kind friend to bad tempered rotter. Furthermore the poor lad has been transported to the Snow Queen’s chilly palace on the North Pole. His erstwhile best friend Gerda sets off determined to find the luckless chap and has many adventures on the way.
A truly magical opening has a cast member beckoning us into a fabulous world – that of the theatre. The camera takes us into The Junction itself and it was like seeing an old friend after a long absence. With a fine ensemble of musicians to provide a melodic underscore, we are whisked into an enchanted yurt in which all the characters we are about to meet are waiting for us. It is a large and generous cast of fine musicians, singers and actors. There is a Brechtian feel to the songs and lyrics and enough edginess to appeal to grownups. As per HCA’s original book, the fantastical tale is told through a series of separate ‘chapters’ – each signifying a stage in Gerda’s quest for her lost friend. My favourite moment, exquisitely done and chillingly bizarre, was her encounter with a flock of academically begowned crows perched up in a tree house. The actors, speaking fluent crow, chorus their advice to Gerda with squawking earnestness. There is something of Lewis Carroll here in which like all good fairy tale telling there is a solid layer of the grotesque just below the innocent topsoil.
Part of the magic of this show was the finger-click transport from yurt to sequences shot in Cambridgeshire woods. Two friendly ogres are encountered living in an old caravan, a bunch of nasty robbers (would-be cannibals) hide out in the forest, a highly mysterious Finnish woman seems to live in her sauna and a friendly reindeer takes the determined lass to Lapland on his tandem bike.
As Christmas plans are scuppered by a real Snow Queen with protein spikes, this warm-hearted production is just the online ticket to warm up the frostiest of hearts.
The Snow Queen is available to stream on the Cambridge Junction website from Sunday 20 December 2020 – Sunday 03 January 2021. All booking online
https://www.junction.co.uk/the-snow-queen
