The Stage

Red Riding Hood

Published Thursday 15 December 2011 at 11:09 by Ben East

There is a quite magical moment in Horse + Bamboo’s wonderful take on Red Riding Hood where the wolf wraps himself lovingly around the young girl. Silence descends upon the previously excitable audience of schoolchildren. They are captivated by a wooden wolf clad in fur clearly operated by Jonny Quick, and a young girl with an oversized paper mache head.

A scene from Red Riding Hood at the Royal Exchange Studio, Manchester

That Horse + Bamboo make such a scene completely natural is testament to their seemingly bottomless reserves of invention. This production of Red Riding Hood mixes masks, puppets, animations and humans to tell the tale of the young girl’s adventures in the wild woods, and huge credit has to go to Quick and Francesca Dunford both for their acting and powers of storytelling.

Quick is adept at ramping up the pantomime elements - particularly when playing the Wolf trying to bake a cake in Granny’s house - and Dunford’s background in movement and performance is beautifully used in the scenes where she puts on Red Riding Hood’s paper mache head. The expression is fixed but, somehow, she makes her ooze emotion.

At the end, Quick and Dunford ask if anyone would like to see the puppets. The young audience literally run to see the wolf. Proof, then, that lo-tech theatrical methods still have the power to mesmerise.