This is not just plain old Hansel & Gretel, you’ll notice. It’s Hansel & Gretel and the Witch. It’s the old fairytale with knobs on, or Newcastle-based balletLORENT going the extra mile.
A dance company that can muster an army of volunteer knitters has clearly had them producing woollen props at the double. Cakes, pastries, mushrooms and other fruits of the forest… Greggs have nothing on this lot.
And dancers with families, it seems, have been told: if they’re on their feet, get them on stage.
There are dancers big and small, and there in the middle of the first-half action – a truly arresting sight - is a balletLORENT tot, 19-month-old Taya MacGillivray, daughter of dancer Natalie, sometimes walking and sometimes crawling but seemingly quite at home among cavorting feral scavengers in masks and outlandish costumes.
Is Liv Lorent’s company, famous for its generation-spanning dance works, now breeding rather than recruiting dancers?
A sumptuous production, following its similarly appealing Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White, takes us – or is this my memory playing tricks? – into darker territory, led by Carol Ann Duffy’s poetic but uncompromising narrative (voiced again by Gina McKee).
The former Poet Laureate was in the audience on Thursday to see her words made manifest.
The show begins happily – “Twice upon a time…” - under a massive harvest moon with Hansel and sister Gretel (Gretel here the elder of the two) living in happy times with their parents, and all masked as in the theatre of Ancient Greece.
Two tall structures decorate a busy stage and between them hangs a sheet which becomes a screen for effective shadow play, the protagonists at times miming the story in silhouette.
It’s an era of plenty. Even the witch, when she first appears (it’s dancer Berta Admettla in there, according to the programme) is up a pole at a fairground, swathed in fancy cakes which swiftly find their way into sticky hands.
The costumes, designed by Masir Mazhar, are wonderful, creating a landscape of colour and texture.
But times get hard, of course. Very hard. Hansel (Montaine Ponceau) and Gretel (Gavin Coward) are impelled to venture into the forest where at first they alight on the natural goodies fleeing scavengers leave behind.
Their glee is short-lived. Eventually poverty has the parents plotting and in the second half the tone darkens considerably.
The siblings suddenly find themselves lost and the witch’s malign purpose emerges with a costume change, patisserie products replaced by swirling grey and a wig like the contents of a hoover bag.
Her cannibalistic tendencies are also revealed, notably a fondness for earlobes.
It’s strong stuff. Then again, the brothers Grimm would never have made it onto Jackanory and while the props may at times look sugar-coated, the same can’t be said of the Duffy script.
And the plot unfolds, of course, to Murray Gold’s pounding and increasingly urgent score.
The witch is eventually outwitted and despatched.
Or is she? Don’t forget that ‘and the witch’ bit of the title.
While the Grimms might have been grimly nonplussed, this is a telling which acknowledges rehabilitation and allows for its earlobe-munching witch a mitigating back story.
Young audience members, assuming they haven’t already fled (none did on Thursday), can therefore leave the theatre suffused in a feeling of generosity and understanding rather than cautioned or chastened. As can the grown-ups, of course.
Hansel & Gretel and the Witch runs until Sunday, November 1. Tickets from Northern Stage.