JANE WALKER attends the premiere of Theatre Antidote’s Fairytale Heart by Phillip Ridley
AGAIN Theatre Antidote has risen to the challenge of difficult subjects. With The Dancing Bear last year, it gave us a moving way to think about coming to terms with death. Philip Ridley’s Fairytaleheart, sensitively directed by Xenakis Kyriakides, is set in the aftermath of a death and is about two teenagers who feel isolated when their parents put their own emotional lives first. In the transition from childhood to adulthood they use play to make themselves feel better about their problems and to bring themselves closer to each other as they embark, in their turn, on the world of adult relationships. This is theatre that reminds us what theatre is for. Since we were little children we played out our infant models of the world, and this play ultimately explores those instincts behind all theatre.
I had qualms about going along with two eight-year-olds and an eleven-year-old but all three were hanging on every word. Antidote almost always finds a level to communicate with everybody in the auditorium. The eight-year-olds responded on the level of pure play. “Wow,” said one of them, “I never thought I would ever see a play that only had two people in it, though!”
Two’s company. Fairytaleheart is both funny and deep; a wonderfully knit two-hander which creates an intimate world and draws us in. Kirsty, played by Katharine Beger, has run away from her fifteenth birthday party to indulge her feelings of self pity in an abandoned local cinema. There she meets a Russian boy, Ivan, Andrei Krupa, who has taken to spending time there painting and inventing stories. At first Kirsty is prickly and sarcastic towards Ivan but the irony is lost on him as his English is basic. Gradually she lets down her guard as she becomes charmed by his way of using his creativity to tackle the loneliness that he feels now his mother has remarried. Kirsty confides in Ivan that since her mother died she also feels let down and neglected by her father.
Together Kirsty and Ivan create and enact imaginative stories about their predicaments. Whether battling giant rats in a jungle or searching for the Luminous Butterfly of Karamazoo, Ivan and Kirsty learn that sharing a problem is the best way to solve it. Ivan values fantasy, a gift absent from Kirsty’s more literal daily life. He creates for them an alternative universe where butterflies are cadmium yellows and you make your own light – literally and metaphorically. The atmospheric, warm candle-lit stage, together with George Karvellos’ live music, promote intimacy and symbolise the teenagers’ own world, one that Ivan has created and wants to share with Kirsty. By the end of the play the two lonely young people have developed their own supportive and trusting language. Their journey is touching but never descends into sentimentality. And after the play is over, its atmosphere stays with you for a long time.
l Fairytale Heart by Theatre Antidote. Melina Mercouri Thetare, Nicosia March 25 and 26 8.00 pm, Markidion Theatre Paphos April 3, Theatre Antidote, Larnaca April 9, Artos Cultural Centre, Nicosia May 15. Performances start at 8pm. Tickets: £5 and £3 for under 18s. [email protected], www.theatreantidote.com.fairytaleheart. Tel: 24 822677
