OBSERVER: Fairytales ruined
“Ready to ruin fairytales forever” was the stark warning that we were given when invited to witness Brothers Bare as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival at Theatre Works Explosive Factory.
Forget any connection to the fairy tales of old, ones that you would share with your children with bedtime reading, this play is strictly for adults.
At times we wondered where the tales had gone as they are dissected in many ways over three separate vignettes.
While directed by Jessica Fallico who also wrote Brothers Bare with associate Iley Jones, they freely explore ideology, gender, body image, addiction and abuse all through the foggy lens of fairytales.
A cast of four play different roles in each of the three vignettes, demonstrating their adeptness to embrace the diverseness of each character, all with some distorted relevance to a fairy tale.
The opening tale with White Rabbit (from Alice in Wonderland) played by Charlie Veitch teasing with the dejected Bride played by Grace Gemmell, raised tensions with their heightened character portrayals.
Charlie Veitch playing a frightening Troll together with fellow Troll, Dion Zapantis, was rigorously choreographed and with extreme lighting was quite unsettling, yet appealing and entertaining.
A very physical and electrifying encounter between Grace Gemmell as the girl and Dion Zapantis as Jacob was exhausting to behold particularly with her violation.
A really good link between and during the vignettes was Elisheva Biernoff-Giles as the Conscious giving further insight into the writer’s quote of the “slippery slope of moral ambiguity, safety and madness”.
You could say that Brothers Bare is not for the faint-hearted, but is well-crafted and presented.
Review by Graeme McCoubrie