The Snow Queen

Hans’s Andersen’s The Snow Queen is a cruelly bleak epic of a fairy tale, in which lost childhood innocence can only be redeemed at the price of suffering and sorrow. So when Finger in the Pie’s version of the story kicks off with the jovial tones of a pre-recorded Sandi Toksvig, it’s a fairly inauspicious beginning. Things get better when Robin Guiver and Jen Pearcey (standing in for an indisposed Ana Mirtha Gutiérrez) embark upon their own almost wordless prologue of boy and girl love, discovering friendship and the fragility of affection as they watch the flowering and withering of a single red rose.

Guiver’s Kay is a thoughtful portrait of unlovely adolescence, gangly and self-centred and utterly enraptured by new intellectual discoveries that transform the contours of his imaginings. His fixation with the mathematical perfection of snowflakes draws him away from Pearcey’s touching, baffled Gerda into the Snow Queen’s ice-bound realm, where he discovers that all his equations are unequal to the problem of recapturing childhood certainties.

Gerda’s perilous quest to rescue her lost playmate is the cue for multiple quick changes, some wonderful object manipulation and a lot of hard work from a cast of four. However, the sometimes pretty but often banal songs do nothing to keep the story moving, or add depth to some hastily sketched characterisations. The style of the storytelling lurches uncomfortably between scenes, and much of the devised dialogue drags, while some beautiful sequences of near-silent physical performance go completely over the heads of younger audience members, for want of a few words of explanation.

In the latter stages of the show, the company achieve some wonders on a shoestring: spiky gothic vistas conjured by a puppet witch, snowflakes hanging eerily in the air, a breathless reindeer ride across the snows of Lapland, and Gerda’s pilgrimage through frozen mountains accompanied by the keening strains of the harmonium. An unsatisfyingly abrupt ending squanders the emotional power of the children’s eventual reunion. But The Snow Queen, despite its oddities and structural flaws, is an intermittently magical winter journey.

The Snow Queen is at the New Wimbledon Studio until 11 January 2009: www.seethesnowqueen.com

Photograph: Ana Mirtha Gutiérrez as Gerda in The Snow Queen. Photograph by Mike Faranden.