Kneehigh's The Wild Bride

Kneehigh’s The Wild Bride, adapted from one of Grimm’s grimmest tales, The Handless Maiden, came to St. Ann’s Warehouse in February.  I found the production utterly breathtaking, exuberant in both its conception and realization by writer and director, Emma Rice, who first introduced us her phenomenal talent in her stage adaptation of David Lean’s 1946 film Brief Encounter. Her imagination is boundless.  No less multi-talented are the performers, five actors and two musicians, who all (or perhaps most of them) mime, speak, sing, dance, play instruments, handle puppets, and double as stage hands, constantly on the move dazzlingly, all actions smoothly marinaded.  Like the queen, who appears as a painting with real hands protruding from it, actions and music, itself a mixture of blue grass, spirituals, and original songs, narrate together; the seemingly incoherent components work together perfectly, like the dancing that goes on as an integral accompaniment to stage actions.  The play can only be described as a rich layered embroidery that tells a simple story with all conceivable embellishment, none gratuitous.