Mashed-up fairy tales, eye-popping visuals and saturated sound and colour go hand in hand in Patrick J O’Reilly’s exuberant The Adventures of Red Riding Hood at Belfast’s The Mac.
It’s busy, loud, paced with enough adrenaline to light up a small town and doesn’t so much bend the fairy tale genre as turn it upside down and inside out. Populated by familiar figures—enough to know that it opens in Fairyville High School—it may be, but none are quite the same as legend would have them.
O’Reilly’s ambitious script cleverly plays with identity as he posits other realities that suggest not all is well in the world of make-believe. So Red Riding Hood is perennially caught between the ‘right path’ and its opposite and all the while afflicted by the jealous barbs of Goldilocks. The Big Bad Wolf is now a yoga teacher in touch with his emotions and appetite; Little Jack Horner a would-be entrepreneur with an eye on self-preening status.
If such textual mischief may elude the youngest audience members, their older siblings will readily pick up on references to TikTok and other zeitgeist fads to relish the sugar-rush of an experience on offer.
There’s something sensory about it all, a quality carried over from O’Reilly’s UK Theatre Award-winning Rhino but taken here to the brink of overload caught somewhere between cartoon and fever dream.
Blending with Diana Ennis’s simple but accommodating set—the computer-chip floor a tell-tale for the glitch in the magical matrix the show exploits—are Gavin Peden’s imaginative, in places beautiful, video design, Jonathan M Daley’s painterly atmospheric lighting and Gillian Lennox’s costumes that delight in colliding Walt Disney with Tim Burton.
Garth McConaghie’s belting sound design and Paula O’Reilly’s energised choreography are well-served by Naoimh Morgan’s firecracker Red Riding Hood, Catriona McFeely’s uppity Goldilocks, Jay Hutchinson’s Wolf, Jack Watson’s Jack Horner and Ash Ashton’s Mama Hood, among which are some West End-quality singing voices.
Reviewer: Michael Quinn