Reader Reviews
The Wild Bride (Lyric Theatre Hammersmith, Outer London)
Back to Show Details| Score | Comment | Date |
 | First half excellent, second half not so good. The play is a mishmash of Faust, Company of Wolves, Billy Connolly (the awkward session where the father /Price / King talks to the audience)and every fairy tale you can think of with a girl lost in the forest. Too many ideas from too many cultures and it couldn't make up its mind to be serious and erotic or just plain slapstick. The changes of the cast were confusing and the second half inert. I would have made it much darker and with a lot more lust and eroticism from the devil. - Jon | 18 Oct 11 |
| I am normally resistant towards physical theatre and especially Kneehigh's brand of relentless whimsy, but I am delighted I relented in the case of The Wild Bride. The Grimm fairy tale, The Handless Maiden, is superbly told by a cast of just six, including one musician and three actresses playing the almost entirely silent bride at various stages. The lighting and sound are used brilliantly to increase the atmosphere and includes an excellent blues and folk score superbly played by the cast. Audrey Brisson brings her Cirque du Soleil experience to the movement and singing, Patrycja Kujawska provides the best modern violin since Fairport Convention and Kevin McCloud lookalike Stuart Goodwin fully relishes the humour of the absurd Scottish dancing prince. The first half is irresistable fun, despite the ordeal suffered by the girl who has her hands chopped off by her father after a foolish pact with the devil. After the interval things get a bit darker and the boisterous simulated sex and eye gouging of Bambi might be a bit much for the 8+ guidance. After the travails of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg this is a return to form for the inconsistent Kneehigh and fully deserved the rapturous ovation from the captivated school parties that packed the Lyric. - David Baxter | 22 Sep 11 |
| This macabre tale of a man who inadvertently sells his daughter to the devil (and her subsequent journey) is a welcome return to form for Kneehigh after four disappointments in a row. The starting point is a faustian pact (with a touch of Robert Johnson’s crossroads brought to the fore by the blues soundtrack) where the devil visits a poor farmer and offers him fancy clothes and bling in exchange for everything in his back yard. He makes the exchange enthusiastically, not realising his daughter is in the back yard. After the devil makes her father chop off her hands, she escapes and goes feral until found by a prince who falls in love and whisks her away, but the devil hasn’t finished yet; he creates a war to send the prince (now king) to and fakes correspondence between him and his mother which effectively sends the girl back into the wilderness. It took too long (45 minutes) to take off, though in all fairness my companion didn’t agree, so maybe it’s just my impatience (if a book doesn’t grab me in 100 pages, I put it down!), but from the point at which she goes feral I was captivated. There’s a terrific blues inspired score from Stu Barker with enough songs to qualify as a musical, though in style it’s a play with music. The girl is played at different ages / stages by three actresses and Etta Murfitt’s choreography has them moving brilliantly in unison. The usual Kneehigh inventiveness is here (though we’ve seen most of it before now) and Bill Mitchell’s design around a central tree is highly effective. The acting honours belong to Stuart Goodwin. who is terrific as both dad and prince / king; the latter a superb comic creation in kilt with a spring in his step. The three girls / women – Audrey Brisson, Patrycja Kujawska and Eva Magyar – are all excellent and Stuart McLoughlin’s devil is suitably smarmily satanic. I still think it would be great to see Kneehigh stretch themselves again beyond gothic fairy tales like they did with their film adaptations of Brief Encounter and A Matter of Life & Death and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, but for now it’s ‘welcome back’ (and an evening free of men in Y-fronts and vests at last!). - Gareth James | 12 Sep 11 |
| Only 2 stars as I felt what was on show was rubbish - sort of university drama department effort but, and it's a big but, it does have potential. There was too much of a Andy Nyman's irritating professor Goodman to start with and too few scary bits. However, it did make me think why someone else hasn't tried this idea before, The Woman In Black excepted. With a major rewrite, lots more scary bits, then I would not be surprised if a run in the West End would not be out of the question. Oh, and why the Jewish thing? That should be dropped for starters. But apart from that I wish them all good luck their original piece of theatre. - rds | 08 Apr 10 |
