My fondness for children is well known so when the call came out for a volunteer to review ‘a delightful fairytale tail with a twist’ you can imagine mine was not the first hand raised. However, being free at the time it was on, I took myself out to Tower Hamlets and the Half Moon Theatre to see Happily Ever After.
The play starts as the audience gets settled – youngest kids on the cushions at the front, adults on the seats – with two Paiges gently cleaning the checkerboard floor of the palace, moving gently, nicely co-ordinated with Patrick Dineen’s music. Once the performance proper starts, the Paiges begin filling the walls of the palace with portraits of previous kings and queens who had ruled the country. Then, with a fanfare, we get to meet The Queen (Bruno Mendes) herself. She does all the Queenly things, waving, smiling and pretending to take an interest in the people that have come to see her. But it’s obvious she is losing as she has a tendency to fall asleep when people talk to her too long. What the Queen would like to do is hand the throne over to her son Prince Bertie (Paul Curley) but there is a problem. Bertie is unmarried. Although he gets introduced to various princesses (all played by Eve Shotton) none of them engage his interest until finally, a princess arrives with her brother (Ady Thompson). The two of them hit it off immediately and very soon a marriage is arranged and the crown handed over, with everyone living happily ever after.
Rather unusually for a review, I’ve told you pretty much the whole story here. This is because Happily Ever After, is aimed at children and they have a tendency not to read reviews that closely but it’s useful for the adults to know what they are taking the little ankle biters to see. The twist to the story is that the prince marries the princess’s brother rather than the princess.
The play is all told through movement, no words, and great music. Does it work? Yes, it really does. Director Nina Hajiyianni obviously knows the audience the show is going for and, together with Designer Rebecca Palmer have put together a charming 45-minute tale that kept the youngsters – and the adults – entertained and, without making a massive thing of it, introduced the idea of same-sex marriage as being an everyday occurrence.
I was really impressed with the way the story had been written, no bells, no whistles, no rainbow flags or massive demonstrations, just an ordinary story of two people who meet, fall in love, get married and love happily every after, which the kids just accepted as fact.
Overall then, Happily Ever After was a really great show. The cast were all superb – and hats off to Eve Shotton for not only playing a number of princesses but making each one a real individual. Every element worked and there really was nothing to find fault with. Even after the show, the cast stayed on stage so the audience could get their photos taken with them. As the audience left, there was a lot of excited and very positive chatter and my favourite piece of overheard conversation was when a young child said to his adult “so, what was the twist?” Pure magic.
Dawid Minnar Janine Ulfane – Photograher credit Alixandra Fazzina. “Survival of the fittest” is a phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection. Which means that even in the most inhospitable of placers, life will find a way – even if at times, you may look and think what’s the point? For example, in South Africa, the aloe plant is considered one of the country’s most powerful, beautiful and celebratory symbols. It survives out in the wild when everything else is dried. At the end of everything, the aloe is still there. And it is this survival that is at the heart of Athol Fugard’s A Lesson From Aloes which has returned to the UK and is currently in residence at the Finborough Theatre. Set in South Africa in 1963, where apartheid is at its height and the citizens are living in a paranoid police state. The play revolves around a middle-aged left-leaning couple – Afrikaner Piet Bezuidenhout (Dawid Minnaar) and hi
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