Hansel and Gretel was a horror story of youthful alienation centuries before Germany’s Brothers Grimm collected it in book form. According to the folklore emerging from medieval Europe’s great famine of the early 14th century, the brother and sister were abandoned in the woods by starving parents who could no longer feed them, only to encounter a predatory cannibalistic witch.
A master of deception, the witch aimed to fatten the naive children with her tempting gingerbread house and then gorge upon their youth.
In a new twist in the tale – Hans & Gret, which is premiering at the Adelaide festival in March – the Windmill theatre company sets the fable in a dystopian future, using technology to demonstrate the ongoing slipperiness of truth in the online age, where our worldview is mediated and manipulated by bad faith actors.
Audience members will be given smartphones and asked to reveal their age group and whether they are more extroverted or introverted – which will determine who of the teenagers are invited on stage. They will wear bone conduction headphones that will rest on the face rather than in the ear, allowing them to hear the actors on stage while simultaneously being fed lines privately from an unreliable narrator – perhaps the witch telepathically speaking into their minds.
In a key scene where Gret is arguing with her mother, adult audience members might hear the commentary, “Gret is ungrateful”, while younger audience members hear “Gret is being suffocated”, fuelling generational division in a show that’s ultimately about society’s obsession with stealing the essence of youth.
The themes are close to home for US-born and based playwright Lally Katz. She remembers one of the shopfront psychics she used to visit in New York placing a curse upon her and then insisting on a large payment of money for its removal. She eventually turned that story into a play, which was then adapted for the screen.
Katz has since given up clairvoyants – “I’m sort of reformed” – although she is again riffing on witchcraft and society’s dark obsession with chasing youth.
In Hans & Gret, which was based on an idea by theatre-maker Rosemary Myers, the children’s mother comes back from a cosmetic beauty retreat miraculously de-aged. Time is going backwards in the siblings’ world: parents are becoming teenagers again, their restoration of youth too delicious to give up, while teenagers and children are disappearing.
Director Clare Watson says there’s a lot of money to be made “creating anxiety about ageing” – and the idea of the commodification of youth runs throughout the play: “How do you grow up, find yourself, embrace everything that comes with ageing – wisdom, loss, grief, falling in love, making mistakes – in a world that’s anti-ageing? What does that do to a young person?”
Dramaturg Sam Haren, the co-founder of creative technology experience company Sandpit, began talking with Windmill about introducing immersive and participatory technology to emphasise the division of the world between teenagers and adults, creating drama out of competing simultaneous perspectives and the unreliability of the narrator.
Together, he says, the two companies asked: “How can we take the same event and have it loaded up with a particular agenda – to make you feel something – by an architect playing around with our different points of view or perception, for their own benefit?”
The hi-tech headphones are usually used by cyclists and runners to keep their ears open for traffic noise. Haren says the narrator’s dialogue, travelling via the headphones through the facial bones rather than directly placed in the ear, is not only clear but “rich and complex, crisp with dynamic range”.
“It’s very strange,” Katz says. “It’s really amazing. I still can’t believe it’s just vibrations in your bones making you hear.”
Yet the challenges for the production run deep: audiences wearing unfamiliar technology while actors tailor their performances around the tech, responding to competing narratives in uncharted theatrical territory.
“We’re all learning, which is the best creative place to be,” says Watson, quoting David Bowie: “Go a little bit out of your depth and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
Watson adds: “We’re definitely in creative territory that has us on our tippy toes. It’s very exciting.”
Hans & Gret is on at the Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide, from 3 March, as part of Adelaide festival
