Hans & Gret

It was almost two hundred years ago when The Brothers Grimm published their version of two children abandoned in a forest, but the tale of the siblings who are seduced into a witch’s house had already been around five hundred years before that. Now Lally Katz has built on a concept from Rosemary Myers to retell the story in the near future, with an emphasis on the choices that children make, as much as those of their parents. It challenges us to consider what we’re prepared to sacrifice to get what we want.

Windmill’s modern story is set around the familiar icon of a box with a roof representing ‘home’. Designer Jonathan Oxlade presents a shiny house on a circular platform that rotates to change each scene. It has a mirrored exterior, so we start the show looking at ourselves – but when Richard Vabre’s excellent lights illuminate the interior of the house, we see a family sitting around a table, all on their mobile phones. Mum (Jo Stone) tries hard to get the approval of her daughter, Gret (Temeka Lawlor); the son, Hans (Dylan Miller) builds an app that leaves digital breadcrumbs, and asks questions about his grandfather, which are deflected into nothing by Dad (Jim Smith).

It's a modern and familiar setting, yet the story is not only told through the conversations from this family; we’re also influenced by a narrator – just not all of us in the same way. Before the show begins, we are asked to don headphones plugged into a mobile device, check that we could hear the voice of the narrator, and then posed a number of questions. The year of your birth is likely to be a simpler answer than your feelings on rice crackers, but the combination of our responses categorises the audience into distinct groups, who then hear different words from the narrator throughout the performance. At one point, some of us are instructed to raise our hands, whilst others are encouraged to clap. And for some of the younger members of the audience who indicated they were extrovert by nature, they are invited to join the performers on stage.

It's a different kind of theatre – not so much ‘choose your own adventure’, as your path is decided for you, but based on some of our life choices, such as whether or not we’ve had children, we get a different emphasis to the story, and therefore a different interpretation of what we’re seeing. What is visible to all are the impacts of over-protecting your family, the risks of rebelling against it, and how what might start as experimentation becomes something much more addictive and sinister.

The performers are strong: Lawlor’s Gret is great as a young girl who thinks she’s fierce, independent and original, but is blinded by her entitlement. Miller’s Hans is underplayed but is the better for it; and Stone’s struggle as a woman trying to be both a Mum and a friend is relatable. Gareth Davies, as the witch, revels in his character – no more so than when he’s a guru breaking the fourth wall and offering incomplete platitudes to the audience. Yet the characters are too often archetypes, and don’t pause long enough for us to see their depth.

Whilst the concepts and core story are fantastic, vital and well-weaved, you might start to pull at a loose thread: as an adult, it could be you’re puzzled that the trauma is presented so fleeting when a loved one is lost; as a younger person, you might be stunned to see how guilt-free the parents are with their self-absorption. You might think the show has a lot to say about choice and not quite enough about consequence.

Director Clare Watson pulls the actors and technology together, and it is shiny, slick, and hilarious so much of the time. Beyond these surfaces, the deeper, more important themes could be explored further in the family. But maybe that’s our role, after the show, to make us examine our own choices and experiences, to make us realise the price we’re willing to pay to get what we want – or rather, the price we’re willing to let others pay.

Mark Wickett

Photographer: Claudio Raschella.

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