G.O.S.

 

This began as an e-mail to my team, but while writing it I thought how much my friend Ronnie Burkett would enjoy it, and so I’ve re-jiggled it slightly to make a blog post.

Early in my career as a choreographer I worked regularly with a hardened, chain-smoking, drop-dead glamorous stage manager. Old school, name of Maggie. She wore a cocktail-dress, for christsakes, in the prompt corner! Maquillage, perfume, the works. She’d seen it all and didn’t think much of it, though she was a woman who had your back if she believed in you. I trusted her judgement implicitly, even when it was jaundiced. She ran her stage like the captain of a man-of-war.
One day we were hanging out together in the scene-dock during the intermission of a pantomime. She’d had a couple of fortifying sherries sent down for us from the dress-circle bar. Companionable silence between us. The company were in tatters at the tail end of three months of nine performances a week. (Three on Saturdays, which was hell!) Even the three alternating teams of juveniles looked like the walking dead. Peachy make-up caked over the chalky pallors of a cast that had barely seen daylight since before rehearsals. Everyone sick to death of the show and yet anxious about beginning the inevitable rounds of auditions to get the next jobs. Maggie surveyed Cinderella’s stout little ponies in their enclosure, where the groom was gloomily sweeping up what you might expect. ‘Fuck!’, she muttered through a plume of cigarette smoke. (Those were the days! Smoking in the scene dock!) I raised my eyebrows questioningly at her. ‘Well…’, she said, ‘… that just about sums it all up!’ I looked blank. She inhaled deeply, her eyes narrowing and sliding sideways in the direction of steaming manure sprinkled with tinsel shed from a passing fairy. She ground her cigarette under an immaculate high-heel and headed for her corner, break over. ‘Glitter on shit, love…’, she called, disappearing into the stygian darkness of the stage. ‘… it’s all fucking glitter on shit! ‘

And she was right, though perhaps not in the way she meant. That’s exactly what fairy tale is, though generations of adaptations have perhaps inevitably stripped back what underlies the glitter. Almost from the start the story of Hansel & Gretel has been garnished with the gemutlich of lebkuchen, glacé cherries of suspicious hue and jaw-breaking bulls-eyes, to the point where many children see only the surface, and not the skull beneath the sugar-icing.

In the Humperdinck opera, the many children turned by the witch into gingerbread are restored to life in the last act, after Gretel has done her shoving. Everyone sings and dances prettily and happiness prevails.

This is definitely NOT the story we have from the Grimm brothers, who don’t balk at the horror. Their witch is a carnivore. She doesn’t magically – and reversibly – transform children into gingerbread, but stews them and sucks the marrow from their little bones. At the conclusion of the opera, Hansel and Gretel are reunited with their distraught and loving parents. In the Grimm version the children are duped by their mother into venturing deep into the forest because she wishes them dead, and their father allows it. I have no idea why at the end, having vanquished the witch and taken her treasure, they head for home. Perhaps they feel safer with the devil they know, though as it turns out, mother has died in their absence. So while it’s a cruel, bleak universe that the Grimms conjure, we know that it is not just through the realms of fairy tale that monsters hunt.

Though I’m conscious that my version may not be the go-to option for parents overly-anxious about what their children read just before lights-out, I’m happy to be restoring a tradition that does not pretend life is a stroll in the park with the reward of a cup-cake at the conclusion. No Disney princesses in this fucking wood!

…