#john mcfarlane

An operatic fairytale told in 3 kitchens. Set in a timeless, modern age, hunger is at the core of this narrative - hunger for food, hunger for the flesh of children, and hunger for vengeance. Surrealistic in design, one feels as though they are experiencing a fever dream brought on and punctuated by hunger pangs. Set designer John McFarlane's scenic paintings are reminiscent of Francis Bacon's screaming popes in their visual cruelty, and wow, I might be having nightmares tonight.

Hansel and Gretel have never been so oddly delirious, casually cruel and careless, yet incredibly childlike and naïve. They play, ignore their chores, and Hansel sneaks licks of cream. In a deviation from the original story, Hansel and Gretel's mother is not evil - she instead mistakenly sends them out in a fit of anger, yet goes with their father to find them. They pass out in the woods and entertain dreams of a fanciful feast, waited upon by a humanoid fish. Upon waking, entranced by a cake carried on a lolling tongue, they enter the witch's house - the industrial basement of a cannibalistic old woman.

Throughout, though, what is most striking is the undercurrent of the possibility of and enacting of violence. Hansel and Gretel's mother pushes them about in anger and desperation when she finds that they have not done their chores. She takes out a bottle of pills and, completely hopeless, nearly overdoses before their father comes in with a bag full of food. Banished from the house and playing with berries in the woods, delirious with hunger, Hansel and Gretel begin to smear the red juice upon themselves, reminiscent of blood.

In perhaps the most striking and horrific ending, the children shove the witch into the oven - and Gretel smears a cream moustache upon Hansel's upper lip, a perfect Hitler moustache. Take a moment here to consider a few things: one, that the classic take on witches is anti-Semitic in origin, particularly their 'large noses'; two, that the witch has been burning children up and eating them for no clear reason; three, that witches are seen as horrific and live out in the woods, othered by society; four, that the oven converts human flesh into gingerbread, and the very last scene is of children rejoicing as Hansel and Gretel prepare to take bites out of the witch's appendages.

Who is who specifically is unclear - are Hansel and Gretel Hitlerian youth, poor and made to believe in ideology that the Jews are stealing all their money? Is the witch the Holocaust itself, cooking and eating innocent children in a room eerily reminiscent of a gas chamber? Does the cycle of violence continue - do Hansel and Gretel gain a taste for human flesh, put through the oven?

What kind of hunger are we talking about here? Hunger for violence, perhaps. A kind of hunger that creates more hunger.