Theatre

Ah, the terrible paradox of the fairy tale – they make fantastic source material, but they are also, almost by definition, unimprovable. Joe Evans’s play with music takes the Grimm tale of the girl with the long golden hair, and relocates it to a seedy jazz bar. Instead of a high tower in the woods, we’re in a basement, heavy with whisky and dramatic chords – a place for ‘the dark side, the grim tales, the minor keys’. Ruby (Johanna Stanton) is the young bar owner, pregnant by the tortured songwriter Johnny Midnight. When he falls under the spell of mysterious older singer Scarlotta (Linnie Reedman), she begins to see the benefits of a nice, untroubled artist like house pianist ‘Mozart’.

The best thing about the show is the music, with Nic van Gelder’s Mozart, and others, at the piano, Michael Chadwick on double bass and everyone singing. The piano is a great prop, allowing van Gelder and Ben Murray-Watson (as Johnny) to show the obsessive, fits-and-starts process of composition. But the smoky atmosphere of Evans’s songs, and the Bohemian chit-chat of the musicians, sits at odds with the demands of the fairy tale story, which wants its conflict out in the open air, not fugged in this incestuous domesticity.
The process is certainly interesting, but the show is hobbled by some confused plotting and a rather clumsy production. As always, the more you stir into a fairy tale, the more pure and powerful the original seems.