Image supplied by the Queensland Theatre Company
Families in fairytales must corner the market in dysfunction. Their homes are mostly what your religious aunt would call ‘non-traditional’ – a mish-mash of parental competencies and neglected siblings, with women who are either wicked or pure of heart and the rest, well, they are silent or absent entirely. In The Magic Hour, which premiered two years ago as the final production of Freemantle’s sadly-defunct Deckchair Theatre, director Chris Bendall and playwright Vanessa Bates transport several fairytales into a contemporary Australian setting, entrusting Ursula Yovich and Ursula Yovich alone to lend a voice to characters that have gone centuries without one.
Yovich channels six largely forgotten women within familiar tales – among them, the gran of a rather rebellious Riding Hood, Cinderella’s fragile and self-aware ‘ugly stepsister’ and Jack’s mother, an addict recovering at the very bottom of the beanstalk. Their sides of the story are not popular, not ‘happily ever after’, but their feelings are still as valid as their desire to be heard. Often in spite of their behaviour, Yovich makes us feel genuine empathy for these women on the fringe – the wallflowers, the old and the poor and the discarded, the women with nowhere to channel the love they have to give. When Yovich, stumbling about as Rapunzel’s elderly caretaker, drops her cane and falls face-first to the floor, you feel the fall too. She is a phenomenally gifted performer with a tangible connection to the audience.
As the doors to the Bille Brown Studio swing open, Yovich offers a motherly welcome to the space, which is transformed into a kind of ramshackle van park. Clutters of autumn leaves lay beneath the stumps of freshly cut trees, strings of multi-colour party lights swing from either side of a rickety wooden home on wheels – a smart centrepiece designed by Alicia Clements which subtly transforms from scene-to-scene. It often seems like it’s other-worldly, glowing even – lighting designer Joe Lui’s own interpretation of that golden hour when a long day winds down. Lui is also responsible for the atmospheric music of The Magic Hour and it floats beneath the stories, a light breeze brushing through wind chimes, perfectly haunting in small doses.
The comparison with the 1986 musicalInto The Woods is obvious – both tread the darker, outer edges of classic tales and have a whole mess of characters in common – but sadly the songs of The Magic Hour are far from Sondheim. Each character gets a song, their brief moment in the spotlight, but none are particularly memorable – in a row they’d bleed into each other, one unrecognisable from the next. It’s a shame too, for Yovich’s voice soars above the music, even when the mix is a little off. There’s sure to be talk about whether the characters are truly aided by these songs or whether it would be a more polished work without them. It would certainly be shorter and despite being clearly printed in the program, some in the audience are still taken aback when the lights come up for intermission.
Length aside, Bates, Bendall and Yovich have collaborated to create something wonderfully ‘not suitable for children’ by thoughtfully excavating our iconic bedtime stories and unearthing the raw, adult drama that was there all along. And while updating Grimm fairytales for a 21st century crowd is far from breaking new ground, rarely has it been done so successfully as in The Magic Hour.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
The Magic Hour
Presented by Queensland Theatre Company
Written by Vanessa Bates
Directed by Chris Bendall
Lighting Design and Original Music: Joe Lui
Set and Costume Designer: Alicia Clements
Cast: Ursula Yovich
Queensland Theatre Company, Bille Brown Studio, Montague Rd, South Brisbane
www.qldtheatreco.com.au
20 – 31 May
