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.
