FringeReview UK 2018

The Snowman

Birmingham Repertory Theatre

Genre: Adaptation, Ballet, Contemporary, Costume, Family, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre

Venue: Theatre Royal, Brighton

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

The most enduring British Christmas hits are melancholy, in stark contrast to say American. There’s a profound sadness in the magic. Howard Blake’s 1982 The Snowman’s now the most famous, but it’s true of Number One hits too. Blake expanded his music twice, to provide an eighty-minute ballet for Birmingham Repertory Theatre by 1993. Here at Theatre Royal Brighton concluding their tour directed by Bill Alexander with music supervised by Blake and David Quigley, magic casements and loss touch the first, frozen end of mortality. For some children it’s their first imaginative encounter with things passing. Briggs knew what he was about.

It’s a desire to contrast with Briggs’ shadows too, and this ballet designed by Rauri Murchison in picture-book style with sliding house furniture bigged up like a doll’s house magnified and in powder colours and a receding set of vaults, provides economy as well as the simplest effects lit by Tim Mitchell and Richard Brooker’s sound billowing Blake’s score as ably as it can from speakers alongside Quigley’s piano and the small ensemble.

Blake enters this wholly. To take a wholly different genre, a small bleak march unusually in G minor by Eric Coates was slowed down even more and became The Dambusters. When you recall it just for a moment, you realize how infinitely sad it is, resonant with all the loss the heroics entailed, a kind of stoicism.

It’s in Blake’s DNA, and like Coates’ march, came from an orphan melody waiting for its time. Blake’s written much fine music, including memorable concertos as well as chamber works – a fine Piano Quartet, Violin Sonata, Trio and Flute Quintet. His opus number stretches over the 500 mark. But he’s written nothing like this.

He found a unique voice in the Snowman’s main ‘Walking in the Air’ D minor theme, still enchanting after thirty-six years in all its forms, and – as has been often said – to the children of those first who saw it. Expanding his music Blake found more memorable invention, particularly in part Two with its spicier writing for Jack frost including a dark little tango. We open that part with a swooping take on The Ride of the Valkyries, and alter various world musics spiced with Khachaturian and early Stravinsky. But dilating his score, Blake never dilutes it with over-quotation: you can pick up essential notes through much of the score, but some of it’s wholly new and relieves the palate.

The story’s naturally expanded from the original trip to the North Pole, with much Christmas Eve business with parents, and a more menacingly contrasted tug of love between Snowman, the Ice Princess Ballerina and Jack Frost, the three leads doubled. I’m thus not sure if it’s Martin Fenton or James Leece for the first, Russell Fine or David Fienauri for Frost looking nothing les than Robert Helpman and dancing like he did from film evidence; its quite spectacular. The Ice Princess was more certainly Tomoyo Taninoto Jequier, matching Frost with one of the most prolonged of roles after the two leads. The boy seems to have been one fo the twins Charlie or Harley Gallagher: utterly assured and winning in his role too. Frederico Casadel as Father and Father Christmas is given lighter costumery than some to work his own magic (more difficult if you’re a Penguin, say), and Freya Field’s scotty snowman proves the most balletically disinhibited of the monster costumes.

Its not a long work, perfectly proportioned for children and an early 19.00 start. It’s still the ideal winter present, especially on a first trip to the theatre. Don’t hesitate.

Published January 25, 2018 by Simon Jenner