Hawk & Hill Theatre
presents
LOST IN THE WOODS
Gilded Balloon Teviot
Wine Bar 11:15am (50mins)
August 2-28 (not 15th)
Written and performed by Arran R Hawkins (Black is the Color of my Voice / The Snow Queen) & Hila Meckier (Gorki Theatre Berlin)
“Once upon a time, a little girl and a little boy were lost in the woods”… That is usually how these things start. Only this time it seems they are not only lost in the woods, but within their own story!
An absurd comedy for all ages (5+), Hawk & Hill theatre bring a new twist to the fairy tales you know and love. With buckets-full of imagination, and oodles of laughter, Arran Hawkins (UK) and Hila Meckier (Israel) teamed up in Berlin to combine their decades of theatrical experience into a fun-filled family theatrical performance you don’t want to miss!
Can they survive the erratic storyline, find the lost pages from their own tale and finish it so they and the audience can get home? Or will they all be stuck in other fairy-tales forever!?
Join Arran R Hawkins and Hila Meckier, the creative team behind Hawk & Hill Theatre, to find out.
What is it about the story of Hansel and Gretel that made you take it for your show?
To be honest, we didn't start by choosing to play Hansel & Gretel. We were dabbling with telling different fairy-tales in a different way, mixing them up and linking them together. A lot of the themes in classic fairy tales are similar. Witches and wicked step-mothers. Wolves and lost kids. Objects that hold some sort of magic or significance (The Apple, The Spindle, The Glass Slipper etc).
We wanted to bring these links together, so when the princess gets pricked by the spindle, it's Rumplestiltskin's spindle, with which he turns the straw to gold, and when the princess falls into her 100 year long sleep, she's awoken by the pea under the mattress. It didn't really work without a structure, as we discovered when we first started playing with the idea. The Hansel and Gretel thing came as an accidental necessity. We needed to find central characters to tell these stories. So what better than a brother and sister who are lost in the fairy tale forest that is infamous as being the location for so many fairy tales.
I see that there is a meta-element to the story, in that Hansel and Gretel are getting lost in their own story. What stage in the production did this become a key theme, and how does it articulate itself in your dramaturgy?
Once we'd decided on using Hansel and Gretel as the main protagonists of the story, we then needed to figure out why they were telling all the other fairy tales. The idea came that they were simply trying to tell their own story, but that the pages of the storybook their story was written in had become jumbled up with the pages from other tales.
I don't want to give too much away, but it involves a very clumsy Narrator, and a brother and sister who desperately need to find the pages to their own story in order to finish it. Once those foundations were built, the show developed very quickly. There have been one or two adjustments since we first performed it, but overall the show almost wrote itself with the two of us throwing things into the mix to see what worked and what didn't.
It is a pessimistic question, but why bring your show to the fringe?
Our plan was always to try and do the festival circuit with the show, which is part of the reason we made it festival length (50 mins). It was put on hold due to covid, but we always wanted to bring it to Edinburgh. The reasons are varied, but mainly as it's a great (if tough) platform to get it seen by industry professionals' with a view to it getting picked up for a tour. A good review at the Fringe is great for future promotion.
Also, the Fringe is just fun. My last show here was The Snow Queen in 2016, which we performed with Gilded Balloon at The Museum. That's awhile ago now, so it's definitely past time to be here again. It's a lot of hard work, and a huge cost really, but where else do you get to perform and have other performers come see your show, and get to see so many other inspiring and imaginative performances.
When you say you are in the show at all of the family, is this part of your general working process? Do you regard yourself as a family, or children's, theatre maker?
I wouldn't claim to be predominantly a Children's or family theatre maker. But I have written and directed a few Family Theatre shows over the years, so I guess I have lent towards that genre more often than not. There's a magic that I'm trying to capture, I guess, from my own childhood, growing up watching theatre in Cornwall, shows at the Minack, or early Kneehigh Theatre (RIP) shows that enchanted me as a boy. Looking out and seeing that same look of enchantment and magic on a family audience is very rewarding. But I do also like to dabble in adult theatre too. The last show I performed in a couple of months ago was very dark, very adult, and very rewarding in its own way.
And the last show Hila and myself made in Berlin before Lost In The Woods, was very much an adult comedy fairy tale, and I directed the one woman show Black Is The Color Of My Voice, which was a serious drama. So there are two sides to my theatre making, definitely. And one of those is the family theatre show, accessible to all, and hopefully both the kids and the adults will get a lot out of it.
I am very interested in the different genres that you appear to be using in the production. How did you manage to integrate these different approaches within the show?
I think it's a blend of our different theatre backgrounds. Hila is a very physical performer, a dancer, with brilliant comedic timing, a very good improvisor. I'm more of a traditional stage actor, a character actor, with an eye for detail. It somehow just works. We first met at a physical theatre workshop Hila was running in Berlin.
A friend dragged me along to it, as I didn't think 'Physical Theatre' was really my thing. But when we met, we realised we had a lot of the same ideas about what we wanted to do. We put on an 'improvised' character comedy show at a mini-theatre festival in Berlin, and off the back of that we were offered a slot to do a Family Theatre show.
This show was a natural progression of that. We brought all the elements from that first outing together, wrote a script, and set about making something that would appeal to a universal audience. Characters, movement, comedy, energy, a shadow screen and lots of imagination. It's also just so much fun to be onstage together. And I think the audience can feel that. When we're having fun, they're having fun, and vice-versa.
Arran Hawkins
Co-writer, Co-director, performer in
LOST IN THE WOODS
Hawk & Hill Theatre 2023
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