BWW Reviews: THE SNOW QUEEN, Unicorn Theatre, December 11 2011

Rosamunde Hutt, Principal Associate Director, is back at The Unicorn Theatre with a Christmas show as big, bold and beautiful as any since moving to its Tooley Street site in 2005. In Anupama Chandrasekhar's adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen, the action is transplanted to modern day India, as Gowri pursues Raj, held prisoner by the grieving Snow Queen in her ice palace and bargains for his release.

Gowri (Amaka Okafor, as feisty and resourceful as ever after six months away from the Unicorn's company) treks from the deep south of the sub-continent through its rapidly changing landscape and culture, travelling from the old India of villages and Hindi Godesses to the new India of traffic-snarled streets and Bollywood royalty. It is in these encounters that Gowrie learns much about life beyond her carefree village by the sea. And the cast and the audience get to have a lot of fun.

Ashley Kumar, Asif Khan and Raj Balaj appear as a range of often richly comic characters: one moment they are a three-headed uber-geek inventor, moonlighting as a hopeless bandit; the next Bollywood stars, one whose vanity would stand out even amongst Shah Rukh Khan and friends, another whose father is bankrolling the operation as he looks more for love than for fame. The boys are supported by Pooja Ghai, Nimmi Harasgama and Deeivya Meir, whose portrayals of the women of India vary from a bandit finding friendship and a conscience, to a mischievous Goddess of Sea to the fearful Ice Queen herself.

At two hours with a short interval, The Unicorn (as it always does) makes plenty of demands on the playstation generation, but such is the pace, the humour and the plot that the kids don't move a muscle, pulling for Gowri as she pursues her captured friend. As in all the best of children's theatre, the mums and dads are as entralled as their kids, and learn just as much about life and laugh just as hard at it too.

How a story as rooted in Northern European traditions of storytelling as The Snow Queen translates into 21st century India is not immediately apparent when one walks into the superb Weston Theatre space. It is the triumph of this production that, on walking out, one wonders how the tale could ever have been set anywhere else.

The Snow Queen continues at The Unicorn Theatre until 8 January 2012.   

 

 

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