Hansel and Gretel

Synopsis

Grimm's fairytale. The classic story of two children sent into the woods. Unable to find their way home, they find a cottage made of cake and candy. Here lives a wicked witch who locks Hansel in a cage and tries to fatten him up ready for her to eat.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 14 December 2012

Well, it's certainly a first in kiddie cries of participation at panto time: "Don't sit on the confabulator!"

Those silly old Brothers Grimm do just that - a confabulator is a story machine - while searching for their next tale and, as a result, they fall inside, rather like the wicked witch shoved into her own oven at the end of the gluttonous child abuse she's perpetrated.

We often say children are good enough to eat, but only the Grimm witch goes so far, having lured the unwanted siblings into her candy cottage. It's a terrible, genuinely frightening story and it was given the right sort of lurid nice but nasty treatment by Kneehigh a few years ago.

Katie Mitchell's approach at the National is to frame it in some mildly funny Grimm Brothers knockabout - Justin Salinger and Amit Shah in top hats chase flying stories with butterfly nets - and decorate it with some low-tec...

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Latest User Review

comine steenkamp - 28 February 2013:

We live in a world where witch craft is actualy really happening and what the witches do in hansel and gretel is what the witches do in real life. To make it out as ok in a movie is wrong. The main dark witch is slanderious against Jesus. Since when is that ok. To make out that a white witch is a "good witch” is wrong. No witch is a ”good witch” they all are busy with the devils work. The movie is not good, at all...

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