Why an Oscar Wilde children’s classic is still a tale for our times
In oSCAR Wilde’s fairytale The Selfish Giant, a nasty ogre comes to realise that the permanent winter that has descended upon his world has been caused by his determination to stop children playing in the grounds of his castle. In Clio barnard’s new film of the same name, this idea serves as a subtle metaphor for the deleterious effect on communities when society as a whole fails children.
“The original story is about what you lose when you exclude children and I guess that’s what I see the film being about too,” says barnard of her follow-up to 2010’s critically acclaimed T he Arbor. “When I was making The Arbor, I was seeing children who were excluded.
“They were on the margins and didn’t have a lot of opportunities so it seemed to me that if you took this Victorian fairy story and made it about these children, what’s that going to tell us about our responsibility to them?”
The Selfish Giant is set on the same council estate as The Arbor, her experimental docu-drama about the bleak life of the late bradford-born playwright Andrea Dunbar, but this time revolves around a young ADHD-afflicted teen called Arbor (Conner Chapman) and his fiercely loyal best friend Swifty (Shaun Thomas).
excluded from school for fighting, and ostracised within their own community, they fall in with a local scrap dealer who uses them to illegally procure copper wiring. With the boys roaming the urban and rural landscapes with a horse-and-cart trying to eke out some kind of living, it’s a film that offers a damning portrait of “broken britain” as an almost postapocalyptic wasteland.
“It does seem like a vision of a future when industry collapses and all the resources have gone,” says barnard. “but it also looks back to something that feels Dickensian.”
That this world exists in the present is what is most depressing about it. barnard says the situation makes her angry too, which is hardly surprising since she clearly understands the potential of those on the fringes.
Indeed, both Chapman and Thomas were cast locally and turned out to be naturals in front of the camera. “With Shaun, you could feel the performance in the room, but with Connor it was a revelation when I got to the cutting room because there just seemed to be more and more layers to his performance…both of them want to continue, so I hope they do.” l The Selfish Giant isongeneral releasefrom25october FIRST, let’s get one thing clear: no word written by any theatre critic will ever make the slightest dent on the great commercial juggernaut that is the stage version of TheLion King. Just as rock stars now use stadium shows to cash in on their catalogue of recorded sound, so Disney uses shows like TheLionKing – now at the Playhouse for a three-month Christmas season – to cash in on the quality of their film output; the only question is how well the material survives the transfer to a different medium.
And the truth about The LionKing is that the show is a distinctly mixed bag, combining flashes of supreme inspiration with elements which are unsubtle at best. The negatives include a truly atrocious script, which makes about as leaden a job as possible of this classic rite-of-passage story about the lion cub Simba’s journey to manhood. And most of the music is completely forgettable, despite some nicely-textured marimba sounds here and there in the orchestration.
The show’s huge achievement, though, lies in the glorious, subtle and beautiful series of animal puppets created by designer Julie Taymor, with Michael Curry – puppets which absorb the human body into a whole Serengeti of stylised animal shapes, which somehow capture the essence of lion and hyena, leopard and giraffe, while also nodding subtly to the human faces of Africa. Moving across a stage drenched in the brilliant savanna colours of Richard Hudson’s set, these wonderful figures win welldeserved roars of applause from the audience; and the show’s 40-strong cast work with faultless commitment and energy, to deliver an experience audiences can rate as a memorable night out, worth all of the £50-plus that it costs. gnarly air guitar in a red leotard during Sexy Lady before getting her very noisy, very young audience bouncing like crazy to the clubby beats and strobes of