@ Manipulate Festival, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh until Tue 3 Feb 2015
Fairytales, due to their immense age, often provide a great jumping-off point for new work – particularly when moved into a different, more active medium. Working to this assumption, Velo Theatre have taken the story of Little Red Riding Hood and expanded it, muddled it, and injected a fair amount of whimsy. The result is often odd, occasionally joyous and always intensely thoughtful.
Breaking down the story until it is presented in non-linear, time-hopping blocks, we come at proceedings from the Big Bad Wolf’s perspective. Talking and often bemoaning his wider role as a dark character and symbol, the Wolf lives with the almost silent Rabbit, a companion who is by turns servile, sinister and poised to revolt. Their home is part junk-shop, part maze, a technique that is echoed in the narrative. Though we build slowly to the climax of the original story – and indeed, the title of the work – Wolf and Rabbit both hijack the story several times, Rabbit in particular ripping out the last few pages in a bid to soften the violent end. Red Riding Hood herself turns up several times, now an old woman dreamily recounting her terrifying experience.
Woven amongst the philosophy and the discussions of life and how to live it are a series of exquisite objects and animations. A projector allows for a dark forest to spring up along the back wall, before being swiftly replaced by the jumbled furniture of a peasant cottage. Bare lights dangle from the ceiling; the Wolf uses them to narrate the constellations as reflections wink and dance in Red Riding Hood’s ruby slippers. The house at the centre of the story appears several times, a delicate model glowing with comforting invitation. And Then He Ate Me manages to pack all this and more into little over an hour, with a show that never feels bloated, or rushed, or in any way conventional. The fairy tale magic seems to have rubbed off.