A very 21st-century fairy tale
As fashion-world satire? surveys a colourful new retelling at the Queen Elizabeth Hall
What to make of Rumpelstiltskin, the 4,000-yearold folktale about a vengeful goblin who exacts a terrible price for helping a miller’s daughter spin straw into gold? The miller and his king seek to impress and to acquire great riches, respectively – and are both successful. Human greed goes unpunished. The goblin kills himself in a fit of rage. No character comes out of it well.
Fairy tales, however, are like lumps of ancient Play-Doh – their DNA remains the same, but we mould them into whatever story best tells us who we are. Bothered by the comatose Sleeping Beauty who is awoken by a non-consensual kiss? At this year’s Stratford East panto, she’s sent 100 years into the future instead, where she triumphs over the evil fairy. Concerned that, in these morally strident times of ours, Rumpelstiltskin is a tad ambivalent? Then emphasise it as a story about abused and misunderstood outsiders – precisely the approach of this family show from Windmill Theatre, the Australian company that comes to the Southbank fizzing with colour.
It begins with a back story. From childhood, Rumpelstiltskin has been starved of love after his parents, appalled by his unconventional looks (he is partly descended from an onion), build a wall around the home and refuse to let anyone see him. He’s now a fashion designer who can “spin diamonds from breadcrumbs” but hides away from the world, leaving a fashionista called Malcolm to pose as the acceptable human face of the Rumpelstiltskin business. To this organisation is drawn an ambitious woman, Harriet. Three times, a disguised Rumpelstiltskin appears to make her increasingly demanding wishes come true: the third wish – to marry Malcolm – comes at the cost of what will be, in future, her most prized possession.
It’s a story about our love affair with image that feels tailor-made for the Instagram generation, and designer Jonathon Oxlade conjures all the giddy, beguiling effervescence of fashion. Dizzying video designs are projected on to a set made from concentric half circles: it’s part Alice down the rabbit hole, part Sixties pop-art psychedelic trip.
Paul Capsis’s Rumpelstiltskin is like a Pierrot clown as dreamed up by Tim Burton; while Harriet, with her long braid of hair, resembles Rapunzel by way of Mary Quant. Played by Sheridan Harbridge with footstamping belligerence, she soon becomes a grasping monster, but at least she has more agency than the original miller’s daughter. Those who rightly want female protagonists in fairy tales to be more than passive chattels might need to accept that one inevitable cost is the right for such characters to behave as unpalatably as male ones.
Yet this is a far-from-perfect show. The first half, with its visual sensory overload, feels as in love with surface style as the fashion industry it satirises. Ancillary characters such as Rat and Crow may speak amusingly in hashtags but they feel little more than narrative accessories. Song and synth-pop dance routines add little and are instantly forgotten. Characterisation is sacrificed for caricatures, from the ditsy fashion assistant Tootie, to camp Malcolm. A European art house clowning style dominates, which is aesthetically arresting but emotionally remote. The whole thing is delivered with an oh-so-cool sense of ironic detachment, in which some sort of arch joke seems to be at play. If only you knew what it was.
The second half comes together: there are touching scenes in Rumpelstiltskin’s gothic mansion where, determined to be a good parent to the baby he has stolen, he reads from a parenting manual while the child plots its escape. And there’s a poignant moment of reckoning as Harriet realises that not everything of value in life is an object to be possessed.
Still, you can’t help but wonder if this highly artful show should have paid more attention to its own message. After all, all that glitters isn’t necessarily gold.