By Darby Turnbull
Dissection of Fairy tales and fables and the ways they mould young minds and worldviews is well worn but still fertile territory. For the last three generations those fairy tales have been heavily filtered through the Disney machine; the brutality, whimsy and sadistic weirdness of Grimm, Anderson, Perrault and Carroll exchanged for more palpable confections (though in some cases still quietly radical) that push hetero cis normative, colonial ideologies in the form of princesses, happy endings and wish fulfillment. Writers Jessica Fallico (who also directs) and Iley Jones describe Brothers Bare as a ‘genre defying fever dream, the fairy tales we grew up on are ripped wide open-exposing the rot between the sugar coating’; it’s certainly that, however subversive deconstructions of Fairy tales are now a sub genre of its own; Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber, Anne Rice’s Beauty series, Lapine and Sondheim’s Into the Woods, hell even Disney inserts tepid but smug over corrections in their abysmal remakes. Brothers Bare, from my perspective, could go a lot further with their concept. The production itself gives them some very strong foundations; the stage craft and physical theatre are excellent and very well suited to the Explosives Factory Space, Rapheal Bradbury’s sound scape incorporates haunting lullabies and tense rhythms to great effect.
Elisha Biernoff-Giles acts as our storyteller, commentator and occasional participant in the action. She does very well infusing her performance with the weariness and frequent desolation of having to tell a story over and over knowing the outcome won’t change. I found myself wondering whether more could have been done with this idea, especially given where the story takes us. Her speeches are in rhyming verse, punctuated with dozens of intertextual references and it gets cloying fast.
Brothers Bare’s first story starts off promisingly; a young princess opts to cut off the foot that’s in the shoe that’s caught in her dress rather than remove the dress and make the date that she’s late for. Into this comes the White Rabbit from Wonderland fame, to offer her an abstract perspective to explore her warped logic (isn’t all logic warped?). It’s whimsical and grim and evokes the brutality of the source materials.
The second, about the poisoned chalice that is the online influencer space and especially what it does to young women’s body image and how their self-destructiveness is festered by literal ‘trolls’ isn’t as thought out as I’d have liked it to be. Though stylistically it’s the most creative; Viv Hargraves’s lighting is wonderfully macabre; beautiful but insidious when it needs to be. The shadow puppetry from the cast is a highlight, and I’ll never rate a show too low for opting for simple powerful manual stage craft in lieu of multimedia. Again, we’ve heard all this before and I felt there could have been more intentional subversion of how the online space has coopted modern storytelling; especially around gender; we have trad wives and alphas using a kind of postmodern fairy tale imagery; it’s commonplace to curate the narrative of your life purely in the service of views, like and subscriptions. It can be incredibly disempowering, which the play emphasises but there’s less insight into how people are compelled to participate in their own dehumanisation whilst believing they are ‘taking control of the narrative’.
The third, which we’ve ostensibly been leading up to is the strongest in its clarity of purpose and execution. We’re warned before it begins that doom awaits the young woman in the story and a woman alone with three men has connotations that even the least sophisticated audience member could grasp. With the dialogue more or less naturalistic and the fables integrated like mine shafts waiting to explode there’s very real tension as we’re made to witness the tactical steps towards the inevitable horror.
Rape and body horror are all over fairy tales, and most callously they are woven into the stories as part of the fabric of society rather than aberrations or violations of personhood. Fallico and Jones’ really hit the mark when flipping the script and bluntly showing how these stories and ideas are the pillars of rape culture.
Grace Gemmell in all three vignettes shows strong range and insight into various shades of fragility and bodily discomfort. Her performance in the final segment is captivating in her physical representation of the body’s response to trauma and the detail with which she pre-empts what is about to happen even as she seemingly tries to give the situation the benefit of the doubt at her cost.
Charlie Veitch and Dion Zapantis each excel in their depictions of predatory male behaviour. Veitch excels as the malevolent white rabbit and Zapantis’ calculating, sadistic ‘bear’ is gruesomely compelling.
Brothers Bare has a very skilled team behind it with clear love and understanding of their craft. From my end, I felt there could have been a little more trust extended to the audience to develop their own perspectives rather than have the themes spelled out for us. If compelled, some deeper exploration into the concept might also lead to some discoveries that could give the piece a fuller, singular identity rather than occasionally feeling like a regurgitation of oft explored ideas.
My own reservations aside, Brothers Bare is a creative, beautifully designed, frequently witty addition to the Fringe calendar. They’re playing at Explosives Factory til October 11th.
