Review: Into The Woods at Guild Theatre

Review by Greg Gorton

Into the Woods is a story about witches, about women called witches, and about women finding power against those who call them witches. It’s told through dance, in front of a consistent digital animation, and sometimes narrated with recordings or by the performers. Beyond this cursory description, I begin to become unstuck.

The production starts in a compelling way - a performer sits on a chair, telling the little-known story of a teenage Cremonan woman in the 17th century, who vomited stone, glass, and small gems. A small image, or icon really, appears on the backdrop, and slowly gets bigger. Soon the story becomes one of the many cases in which a woman is tortured to confess that she slept with the devil, poisoned and killed children, and deserved to be cut and hewn into pieces before being executed.

The show devolves quickly, with two performers, dressed and masked in black, “telling” two separate stories from around the world that also had supernatural women involved. They pass a microphone back and forth as they dance.

At one stage the dancing is secondary to an animation of a talking pig, offering a monologue that may have come from a mystical woman in history or myth. Another scene involves the two masked dancers dragging around a woman in tight skin-coloured clothing, almost as if playing with her as a doll. The show ends with a literal representation of fighting a devil.

Writing this, I honestly feel better about the show. At the time, not a single dance movement made sense to me, I was distracted by my concerns about the method used for creating the sixty-minute animation with varying levels of uncanny valley, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what any of this had to do with making a cake. The dancing showed a serious physical strength and control, but I rarely felt that the choreography had any meaning as act or representation. The passed microphone did not appear to be the source of the narration. So was I in the wrong frame of mind? Thinking more about it, I find merits. It even caused me to research the poor teenager (who was never accused of witchcraft but was one of essential case studies of Italian medical thinking, which might be something the creatives wanted to get across to us). While I cannot recall a thing about the music, I often find that this is more positive than critical and observation - it must have been a good match for the performance itself.

It’s difficult to recommend Into The Woods to anyone who isn’t a die-hard dance lover. I suspect too much of the depth was too subtle for me, and what sat on the surface was too confusing to be enjoyed. However, this was far from an offensive production, and for many I think there is enjoyment to be had.

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