The Woodcutter by Kate Danley

Everyone loves fairytales don’t they? It seems from this debut novel that it is possible to love then too much.

I wanted to like this book so much, but in the end I found it lacking in so many ways. Some of the other reviews of this book complain that there are just too many stories and characters crammed into a story, but that isn’t my complaint. Fairy tales are meant to be retold, and told again, and told anew once more. There are so many tales out there, many of which are variations of each other. Having the character of the woodcutter running through all of them is a really good idea – hell I’d also, independently, had that idea – after all he features in so many of the stories and it is a link to this thick, dark, German forests that it just makes so much sense.

However, the woodcutter is the only major character you really get to know, and even then you don’t really get to care for him or what it is he does. The short chapters that are, at times, sentence length, are also to short and it only adds tho the confusion. I know what the as author is trying to achieve with the short scenes because I myself have experimented with a more filmic style but I have learnt that it just doesn’t work. In this, for one, more can be less.

I found the whole story plodding and uninteresting, which is a shame because there is an idea in there that I really wanted to read. I just couldn’t find it.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

I bought this book on impulse after reading a review from a good friend. I didn’t have any idea what the book was going to be like. What I found was a story that was a proper modern fairytale – a story which weaves the unfamiliar and the magical with our real world lives.

It starts with a simple idea: a child’s imagination that a pond at the end of the lane could be an ocean. You cannot be prepared for how important that simple image is going to be to the story.

At times this book is disturbing with some themes and images that really make you think, but it just serves to deliver an even more powerful story. It’s a true modern fairytale.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

I bought this book on impulse after reading a review from a good friend. I didn’t have any idea what the book was going to be like. What I found was a story that was a proper modern fairytale – a story which weaves the unfamiliar and the magical with our real world lives.

It starts with a simple idea: a child’s imagination that a pond at the end of the lane could be an ocean. You cannot be prepared for how important that simple image is going to be to the story.

At times this book is disturbing with some themes and images that really make you think, but it just serves to deliver an even more powerful story. It’s a true modern fairytale.

For a retelling to really work for me, it does need to still follow the original story if in a different setting. This, was a comedy-drama that could have been about anyone, but instead had some Rapunzel-esque images, characters and motifs thrown in as if as an afterthought.

An entertaining watch but ultimately not satisfying in the way that the original Cruel Intentions or 10 Things I Hate About You were.

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Then on Saturday night we went to Creation Theatre’s new production of Hans Christen Andersen’s Snow Queen in the crisp white industrial lines of the the BMW Car Factory (where they make the minis). The site specific theatre company normally do Shakespeare and in the parks of Oxford in the summer, although in recent years they have done Macbeth in an actual working car factory using cars as props, and have done winter shows in an antique spiegeltent (mirror tent). Following on from last year’s A Christmas Carol, this was the company moving back into the warm into a vast deep theatre space to tell the story of Kay and Gerdur and their fight against the Ice Queen.

It was, quite simply, fantasically brilliantly magical. If you are anywhere remotely near Oxford – hell if you are anywhere remotely near England! – you should get along to see the disco dancing the crows, the rollerskating villains, and (for you Archers fans) the reasons why Kirsty won’t be getting any really beefy storylines in the next couple of months.

Front Row reviewed the show last week, and I felt compelled to email Mark Lawson/the show to tell him that he had thoroughly missed the point. Firstly, in the review Mr Lawson said that at just short of 3 hours long, they had added in other fairy stories into the story of the Snow Queen, but this is simply not true. I came back and read Andersen’s original. It is a story that contains a series of smaller adventures: Jasmine and the flower people, Mr and Miss Crow, the Bandit Queen and the Cod Women. It’s all there in the original, and this is what Creation Theatre gave us.

Secondly, Mr Lawson went on and on and on about whether the very traditional theatrical techniques would work for a modern audience of kids who have grown up with the Harry Potter and Tolkien films and the dvd and playstation generation. Well, Mr Lawson, to answer that abasolutely rediculous question you just have to observe the kids in the audience and hear them talk in the interval and as they leave at the end. Sheets for flowing rivers that spit red boots back out repeatedly, rollerskating across vast tracts of stage, evil queens on stilts and a small cast that swells throughout the the show to make you think it is vast, are fantastic techniques used creatively to imaginative effect.

This is a show, which, stands alongside the great tradiional festive fair of The Nutcracker no less – it’s a show that could and should be revived year after year adding to it and updating it in subtle ways and always seeming fresh. It’s a classic in the making.

Go see it. Now. That’s an order.