Squillions of apples are piled along the curve of the stage, quickly setting the scene for re-spun storytellers Shake & Stir’s dark fable-mining Grimm. But this is no minimalist show, nor is it Disneyfied in any way, shape or form.
The apples are just the teaser. Raise your eyes ‘twice up under’ and they’ll fall on one of the best sets erected at Arts Centre Melbourne in recent memory. Conjured by set sorcerer Josh McIntosh, it’s centred on a crooked arch that’s ringed with cabaret-style lightbulbs and cupped by faded gold curtains, revealing a sparkling backdrop.
Leaning vertiginously, everything around it appears equally off-kilter, including a wibbly-wobbly piano and a skewiff sideboard, evoking a sense of us having collectively fallen down the rabbit hole before the show – which is by Nelle Lee and director Daniel Evans and adapts a hodgepodge of ghastly fairytales by the Brothers Grimm – even begins.
Around this subsiding palace, the bric-a-brac of childhood memory lies. A red cape. A spinning wheel. A rocking chair. A picnic basket. A gangplank. How bout ‘dem apples?
With the theatre industry buffeted by rolling crises spiralling from savage funding cuts, it’s hardly surprising many productions, both indie and mainstage, scrimp and save wherever possible, often folding the major roles of set and costume design into one. So it’s great to see the level of detail McIntosh has been able to achieve in this production, which is set to tour to Newcastle, Alice Springs and Darwin after its Melbourne run.
Even better that Grimm’s simple but effective fast-change costumes have their own magician in Paul McCann. Together, the world they have crafted here is magical to behold.
Grimm review – quick links
Fairytale players
So who are our players ducking in and out of this pantomime-adjacent world’s many concealed nooks and crannies, all while throwing on and removing items like a wolf’s fur coat, a witch’s grey wig and a beast’s mangy collar and cuffs?
In Grimm, the cast switches roles on the flip of a golden coin. Co-writer Nelle Lee predominantly dons the scarlet fetters of a punk-arse Red Riding Hood. She’s been at this game a good bit longer than the huntsman’s axe-wielding girl we once knew, and is a little too fond of mother’s ruin, resulting in scoffing all the bread meant for granny.
She’s also panicking about midnight’s omnipresent stroke, which will strike her down into an apparently unlovable 40-year-old. You see, a girl can still dream of happy ever after, even if this Hood(lum)’s not-so-pure-of-heart. And why should she be as pure as the driven snow, only to be sacrificed to a man’s desire?
This land far, far away is a shifting (bad) dreamscape where the Prince Charming too easily blurs, accompanied by a clap of thunder, into his dark mirror image: a murderous robber baron who elicits a bless-and-spit reaction at the very mention of his misdeeds.
It’s telling that Henry Rollo’s Adam Ant-adjacent royal also morphs, fur coat on, into the piano-playing Big Bad Wolf. In this inversion of the bear vs man in the woods dilemma, a puckish Aljin Abella’s so-called ‘cursed’ Beast might be a better offer. The latter is a kind if lonely soul who longs for companionship, but he’s still considering non-consensual open-heart surgery. An impossibly adorable puppet Bambi (manipulated by Lee) should beware.
An arch Helen Cassidy is both a majestically jolly, German-spouting (with surtitles) menace of an uber-witch, who’s pissed someone else ate Hansel and Gretel first, and our Cinderella here is the Grimm-appropriate Aschenputtel. She’s lost her tongue and is put-upon by her wicked stepsisters (played by Rollo and Abella) who are willing to undergo an extreme makeover by hacking off their toes to fit that glass slipper.
Body horror beats
While there is a bucket of former toes on show here and a fair bit of attempted (and achieved) murder, Grimm is a good bit lighter in spirit than Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt’s recent marvellously sick-making body horror, The Ugly Stepsister.
A jolly romp with toe-tapping musical interludes (guided by composer Guy Webster and choreographer Dan Venz), Grimm is a real good time that playfully pokes at the misogynistic underpinnings of these shapeshifting stories without ever becoming as dark as lighting designer Trent Suidgeest’s blood-red bathing suggests.
Saucy and sorcery-led, throw in some swashbuckling (staged by fight director NJ Price), along with a magnificent mash-up between Icona Pop and Chappell Roan plus a divine Dirty Dancing needle drop, and you’ll want to prick your finger on the spindle of Shake & Stir’s bloody good fun night out in the woods.
