Edinburgh Fringe
Paradise in the Vault – Reviewed 5 August, Playing August 6-10, 12-17
Reviewed by Emma Sibbald
4****
Edinburgh’s literary theatre company, Some Kind of Theatre, provides an evening of thought-provoking excitement in their 2019 Fringe offering, Grandmothers Grimm. Marie Hassenpflug has crept away to meet with the curious but innovative Grimm brothers, and a night of argument, recreation and exquisite invention commences, performed by a stellar and highly energetic cast. Grandmother’s Grimm contrasts the warmth of an oft-told tale with an exploration of its genesis, providing a dynamic performance of familiar tales with a profound and questioning edge.
The piece returns us to the original setting down of the ancient tales, before they morphed into bedtime stories for children. The original Grimm tales were certainly moral, but they were also coloured with gruesome details. Who can forget the glint of the scissors used to cut Little Red and her grandmother from the rapacious wolf, or the image of Cinderella’s ugly sisters, desperately removing toes and heels to fit their stepsister’s tiny glass slippers? Modern retellings of these fairytales excise the ghoulish details, and so it is a delight to observe their reintroduction, told skilfully by a cast that recognises the audience’s connection with numerous strands of story; the more sanitised versions, the darkness of the Grimm originals, and a third notion of fairytales, in which women, both as fully realised characters and as thriving creators, take centre stage.
In fairytales, women are everywhere. The charming heroine wears a hood/pricks a finger/marries above her station, and interacts with her grandmother/strange fairies/lonesome crones, fights her sister/more fairies/other queens. Even though men can appear to be the protagonist, it is women who motivate and mould the narrative. Who are these women? What are their beginnings? Grandmother’s Grimm reminds us that the skeletons of these stories did not begin with two gore-mad brothers, but rather as folk tales, told and retold by predominately uneducated women with few resources and soaring imaginations.
The teller of a tale is almost as important as the tale itself – the very nature of oral tradition embraces the personal flourishes and inconsistencies that comes from recreating stories from collective memory, and all four performances captured the fairyteller’s tension between familiarity and originality. Justin Skelton’s gleefully weird rendition of a rooster-riding, bagpipe-playing hedgehog was highly enjoyable, and his performance of Jacob Grimm added a reliably quirky edge to the marriage-shy writer. Gerry Kielty as Wilhelm Grimm persuasively played both charming materialist and violent extortionist, embodying the double act of a storyteller, and Jenny Quinn brought convincing idealism and starry-eyed creativity to the far-seeing Marie Hassenplfug, a fairytale heroine in her own tale of erasure. The play opens to Emily Ingram’s highly physical performance of Old Marie, playing both the wolf and a grandmother, and this double act was involving, even mesmerising. As the petty squabbles of the Grimm brother’s faded, we were reminded that fairytales are still stories that can still leave you breathless, no matter our knowledge of the outcome.