Form thrillingly matches content in this new stage presentation of Angela Carter’s reworkings of folk tales. The ambiguities and fluidities of Carter’s stories are rewritten in light, sound and movement by co-directors Theresa Heskins (artistic director of the theatre) and circus specialist Vicki Dela Amedume.
“Wolf is carnivore incarnate,” says an offstage speaker, dimly visible in one of the foley booths set into the back wall of the round auditorium. Grey-clad forms run, range and lope round a circle of light on an almost empty stage, its bareness broken by vertical steel poles. On to these the figures leap, climb, twist, stretch, crouch, fall precipitously. A percussive backing drums heartbeat echoes. Without mimicking wolf movements, the performers powerfully convey their strange otherness.
The wolves race off. A youngster enters the space that was theirs. Shadows striate the circle of light; birds sing. Red is, she tells us, at the “magical in-between” age, the hinge state between girl and woman. As her mother (concerned Tanya-Loretta Dee) and grandmother try to shape Red’s course in life through instructions and stories (enacted within the action), Danielle Bird’s sprightly Red begins to challenge the boundaries they set. Why must she keep to the path? She has her knife and knows how to use it!
The second half brings us to the (ahem!) meat of the matter: Red’s encounter with the Huntsman-Wolf (a terrifying transformation from Sebastian Charles). No spoilers, but I’d advise not getting too attached to Lorna Laidlaw’s Granny. Now, Red must choose her own path.
Here, the production is seduced away from the thrust of the story by the splendid skills of its performers: a balletic mid-air interaction in the folds of red silks hanging from the flies is beautiful but too long. That rare misstep aside, I recommend this compelling realisation of Carter’s stories over Neil Jordan’s acclaimed 1984 film of the same title.
Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves is at the New Vic theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 12 October
