Rumpelstiltskin

Insane Root - John Wesley's New Room


I think I am finally beginning to understand theatre. I used to think that theater was a kind of live TV, or maybe a small scale movie, where actors pretended to be fictional characters and told you a story. I now see that acting is better understood as a kind of professional sport. Actors take on Great Roles in the spirit that athletes take on great marathons. Timon of Athens and Krapp's Last Tape get put on, not because they are particularly good stories, but because actors want to see if they can fulfill the impossible demands of the role. Audiences watch in the same silent awe that they would watch someone juggling chainsaws across a tight rope.

Rumpelstiltskin is one of my favourites of the Grimm tales. Tonight's show was a riff on the story, rather than an adaptation of it. It was billed as immersive and site specific, but we weren't required to follow the actors all round the building. The cast of three greet us in the foyer, and after some preliminary, Gaimanesque guff about how all stories start with "once upon a time" and how words are powerful things we follow them into the chapel where the majority of the show is performed on what could reasonably described as a "stage".

There were some interesting twists on the folk tale. The Miller (Dan Wheeler), far from being boastful, is modest and tongue tied and illiterate and is only speaking metaphorically when he tells the King that his daughter can spin straw in to gold. The King (Norma Butikofer) is an out and out psychopath who finds a perverse amusement in locking people up and telling them to perform impossible tasks. The solution to the riddle is ingeniously at right-angles to the normal story. The evil spirit challenges the Miller's daughter (Katie Tranter) to "tell him his name"; but it turns out that he hasn't got one. The heroine defeats the spirit by giving him the name Rumpelstiltskin; some how the act of naming him takes his power away. Because stories and because language.

The meat of the play comes in the three extended scenes in which the Miller's daughter, locked in the dungeons with a spinning wheel and pile of straw, engages in long, riddling dialogues with the mysterious, invisible, nameless sprite -- represented by the other two members of the cast and some suggestive puppetry. The sprite talks about himself in the third person, but avoids calling anyone "my precious".

I very much enjoyed the portrayal of the sardonic, cruel King. The riddle contest, in which the King and the Miller's daughter reel of endless lists of possible names, was quite funny. The opening and closing scenes of the Miller's daughter reading her illiterate father fairy tales were quite touching. And the psychodrama in the dungeon cells were skillfully and powerfully invoked.

But I did come out feeling that I had been acted at for an hour and a half.