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tales from the brothers grimm
design role: Set and Costume designer; Scenic Artist; Puppet maker; Costume maker adaptor and Director: Gari Jones company: Creation Theatre. venue: Victorian Spiegel Tent, Oxford. date: 2008 Gari Jones’s innovative adaptation of the Tales from the Brothers Grimm is structured to accommodate conscious story-telling action. Each tale begins apparently spontaneously, actors taking their roles seemingly at random. Although the text modernises the stories, embedded within it is an acute understanding of their folk roots, a centuries old sense of the magical, the fearsome, the delightful. The play was aptly staged in a Victorian Spiegeltent; a domed, round building, with painted mirrored panels decorating the walls inside. A small central stage allowed audience seating in the round. The set was an ironic play on the generic fairytale forest, created out of real tree branches sprayed up in unreal colours, gaudy fake flowers, and fairy lights, suspended above the audience. The actors each had a ‘home’ – a lightbox painted up as a house, and hung on a stick. The show made a point of subverting audience expectations and Christmas show clichés. The costumes were a deliberately eclectic and fantastical mix: youth culture, iconic and eccentric items, traditional Germanic style folk costume. review extracts ‘There is a wildness at the heart of these early 19th-century folktales that comes from the oral tradition of listening to stories …Lucy Wilkinson's design recognises this, with its tiny lantern cottages giving a welcome glow in the dark woods... it certainly looks good enough to eat.’ Lyn Gardner, The Guardian. ‘Enchanting...’ The Stage The cast are impressively skilful… convey the richness of the content in a fine demonstration of storytelling. Jeremy Kingston, The Times .
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