Having expected to be overwhelmed by a selection of gruesomely entertaining stories told by Louna Productions, a German-Scottish company that promises to ‘retell fairytales in unexpected ways’, I found myself leaving the theatre mildly disappointed. Although the stories themselves have their fair share of disgusting delights, the performance as whole misses a certain spark that could have made Grim(m) – Unreal Stories for Real Times a tell-all-your-friends success.
The performance retells a selection of fictional tales, taken mainly from the Brothers Grimm collection, and presents them to its audience in the order of a menu beginning with a starter tale and continuing on through main, dessert, and of course all those little courses in-between, culminating in six stories all together. This presentation technique works well: it gives the piece a clear structure and allows its audience to follow the stories individually; there is never any confusion as to when one story ends and another begins.
My disappointment was not so much because of the stories themselves, but rather because more could have been done with them. The two actors coped well, slipping in and out of characters and narration, but at times, their individual characterizations did not fully impress. The company’s biggest strength is their physical theatricality, and this was in turn the performers main way to define characters but vocally there was often no change and, considering both actors have rather notable accents, the repetitive nature of their prose did become wearing at times.
The piece as a whole is entertaining and definitely watchable; my problem is that there is that in not fully engaging with the stories wicked characters the actors do not fully engage with the text. For me there was confusion between whether the piece was to be told in a story like fashion or performed to its audience, if the characters were more embodied by the two actors then I believe the obvious talent the women have for storytelling and the text within the tales themselves would boost this show from good, to very good – and who wouldn’t want that.
