Article by:
Mary Brennan
Scottish Ballet’s entire year has been marked by a series of bold, risk-taking initiatives, from David Dawson’s radical take on Swan Lake to the bravura extremes of a Preljocaj/Pite double bill for the Edinburgh Festival. Their Christmas offering carries that impetus to an appropriately thrilling (and Grimm) conclusion.
In reviving Hansel & Gretel (from 2013), the company’s artistic director Christopher Hampson has been able to burnish his earlier choreography, ensuring – as Humperdinck’s lush score provides lollipops of its own – that the cautionary tale reaches out from its heart of darkness with a dramatic immediacy that transcends folklore fantasy. Yes, this ballet says, Hansel & Gretel do fall prey to “stranger danger”, but the vulnerability that delivered them into the candy-toting clutches of the Witch crept in because of parental indifference at home.
This is genuinely shocking territory but Hampson is adept at balancing light a
This is genuinely shocking territory but Hampson is adept at balancing light and shade throughout his ballet. He engineers merrily black comedy out of the fag-smoking, beer-swilling Mum and Dad. As for the Witch, abandoning her initial aura of beguiling glamour, she takes on a kind of cartoonish grotesquerie that seems merely eccentric until she deprives Hansel of both his beloved teddy-bear and his liberty. Araminta Wraith’s transformation from floaty fairy elegance on pointe, to hunched-up, beetling crone in baffies is done before our very eyes. Scary? Admirably so. And because Bethany Kingsley-Garner (Gretel) and Andrew Peasgood (Hansel) have brought such believably childish strops to the sibling’s relationship, we have truly come to fear for them. Is Hampson going to give them a happy ending?
The closing moments are not just full of joy but, like much of Hampson’s resolute story-telling, they opt for a real-life simplicity over spectacle - ensemble opulence, however, is given delicious licks in a gorgeously-staged dream sequence. The darkly forbidding forest responds to the children’s inner yearning with a magical banquet and Mum (Marge Hendrick) and Dad (Evan Loudon) appear in a swishy, romantic duet – just one of the cleverly choreographed delights in a dazzling seasonal treat that show off the entire company at its versatile best.
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