{"id":1212,"date":"2015-12-29T17:37:12","date_gmt":"2015-12-29T17:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1212"},"modified":"2016-01-14T23:34:05","modified_gmt":"2016-01-14T23:34:05","slug":"sad-face","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2015\/12\/sad-face.html","title":{"rendered":"Sad face"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lorax\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As a child, I was never afraid of the dark. I don\u2019t mean actual nighttime (you don\u2019t achieve inky darkness in light-spilling London). But cruelty, sorrow, isolation: these thread their way through many of the best children\u2019s books, reaching out a hand to the solitary reader in his ladybird dressing gown and first pair of glasses.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean gloom-drenched stories. Quite the reverse. My favourite protagonists \u2013 from Alice and Paddington to Abigail\u2019s Raven \u2013 were individualists, propelled by curiosity and a stubborn sense of integrity, which helped them navigate adventures and assess the baffling demands of an unpredictable adult world. Loss and peril might thrum behind them, but didn\u2019t preclude wit, ingenuity or sheer fun.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the same in the theatre. Delicious darkness steals into several holiday shows. Jon Klassen\u2019s poker-faced book I Want My Hat Back<\/a><\/em> \u2013 a stone-cold modern classic \u2013 implies a conclusion of gore and injustice. Joel Horwood\u2019s National Theatre adaptation \u2013 which I haven\u2019t seen, to my sorrow \u2013 reportedly enacts Bear\u2019s grim retribution upon Rabbit. Scarlet ribbons all round.<\/p>\n

Several family shows I\u2019ve seen this month are happy to dance with the dark. wonder.land<\/a><\/em> is the National\u2019s flashy update of Lewis Carroll\u2019s Alice<\/em> adventures; Stephen Sondheim\u2019s fairytale mash-up Into the Woods<\/a><\/em> was revived in Manchester; and the Old Vic produced eco-parable entertainment in Dr Seuss\u2019 The Lorax<\/em><\/a>. Each may send you out sadder but wiser. Growing up is full of fear. Sometimes people leave you<\/a>. Nature may not survive our greed. Happy holidays!<\/p>\n

\"David<\/a>

David Moorst in Into the Woods. Photo: Jonathan Keenan<\/p><\/div>\n

If each of these ambitious, large-scale shows sounds like a downer: well, they are. Matthew Xia\u2019s unfailingly lucid production of Into the Woods<\/em> shuns the warmth of the recent Disney movie, and can seem overly earnest. Archetypal figures get bogged down in ethical quandaries and bereavements as they negotiate life in the happy-ever-after. Actors like Amy Ellen Richardson as the intrepid Baker\u2019s Wife or David Moorst as giantkiller Jack (so good in Gary Owen\u2019s Violence and Son<\/em><\/a>, as another awkward adolescent with an overactive fantasy life) make every word count. If that means that Cinderella and Red Ridinghood get the bounce knocked out of them \u2013 well, that\u2019s what life does to you, kid. Yet the ripple of Sondheim\u2019s lyrics \u2013 backtracking rhymes and sharp puns \u2013 doesn\u2019t cease, even as they have to frame sombre subjects. They\u2019re a survival guide in themselves.<\/p>\n

No escape from the witless<\/strong><\/p>\n

Carroll\u2019s corkscrew imagination \u2013 he was a rogue mathematician, letting logic roam into play \u2013 does something similar in his Alice<\/em> books, as his heroine squares up to tyrants, tea parties and shape-shifting cats. Her resolve and questing scepticism form a tool kit that would stand anyone in good stead \u2013 \u2018You\u2019re nothing but a pack of cards\u2019 is a constant motto. But the National\u2019s misbegotten wonder.land<\/em> steals that tenacity and sinks into self-regarding gloom. Damon Albarn of Blur, working with playwright Moira Buffini and the National\u2019s artistic director, Rufus Norris, makes his Alys a contemporary troubled adolescent (broken home, bullying school) and wonder.land her online refuge. A virtual gamescape makes sense \u2013 with attendant messages about internet safety and real life confidence \u2013 but what sinks the piece is the relentless misery. Everyone is unhappy, and bewails their woes at length \u2013 not just Alys, but her friends, her estranged parents, even the prime villain, a Cruella headteacher who laments her social isolation and trust issues.<\/p>\n

However whizzy the production \u2013 and the costumes, video and choreography keep producing the dazzle, from sculpted fantasy clobber to a glittercannon teapot \u2013 there\u2019s no escape from the witless. Buffini nailed quixotic female agency in her zingy comedy, Handbagged,<\/em> about the Queen and Mrs Thatcher. This glum trudge, on the other hand, was the only review gig this year that I longed to abandon. Damn you, sense of duty.<\/p>\n

Puppets and muppets and trousers and wigs<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you think these fables of emergence into adulthood are grim, how about the death of the planet? The woofly-moustached Lorax, in Dr Seuss\u2019 slim, sad narrative, fails to prevent the Onceler from wiping out his beloved woods: helpless against the profit motive and the chainsaw. As a plotline, it\u2019s a stark, downwards diagonal. The Onceler, an inventor-turned-exploiter, chops down the truffle trees to make their lovely tufts into the essentially useless, bafflingly profitable thneed. There follows deforestation, pollution and eventually devastation. Happy holidays!<\/p>\n

The sombre plot is nonetheless energised by the madcap relish of all involved. In David Greig\u2019s smart adaptation, the Onceler (a gleefully limber Simon Paisely Day) retains the kernel of idealism that made him strive to escape his subsistence upbringing. Destruction runs alongside dreaming. And the infectious rhyming never runs dry. Greig expands Seuss\u2019 text with pun-stippled glee, while Charlie Fink\u2019s songs are a genre jamboree. The actors all double and triple their roles. Trees unfold from the ground and then shrink into holes. There are puppets and muppets and trousers and wigs, as the Onceler\u2019s destruction just biggers and bigs. (The rhyming\u2019s contagious, I\u2019ve caught the disease. Just creep away quietly \u2013 shut the door, if you please.)<\/p>\n

Sorry about that. I mean that Max Webster\u2019s production rescues a helpless story from despond, because it insists that we each hold the seed of imagination and invention \u2013 and that we\u2019re not helpless.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no reason why family shows should be primarily celebratory, even at Christmas: children, like anyone else, can cope with troubling ideas and muddied emotion. Each of these sad-face productions carries a slightly anxious freight of message from their adult creators: Sondheim\u2019s Manhattan liberalism, or Albarn\u2019s acutely modern insistence that we are defined by our pain. In The Lorax<\/em>, Seuss\u2019 hippyish innocence meets our climate-changed sense of futility, but holds faith with the future. The ushers hand out packets of seeds as we leave.<\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/p>\n

Image\u00a0at top: Laura Cubitt and Simon Lipkin\u00a0with the Lorax. Photo: Manuel Harlan<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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