Tara Lynne O’Neill’s Hansel & Gretel, the Lyric Belfast’s energetic and colourful main stage Christmas show, takes a sideways glance at the oft-told tale to lace its cautionary fable with cheering homilies.
Carrying itself with the excitable sugar rush you might expect from feasting on gingerbread houses, it marks a break in recent Lyric tradition of festive musicals by Paul Boyd. Here, O’Neill, whose debut play, Rough Girls, was premièred at the Lyric in 2021 and filmed by the BBC, teams with songwriter and sound designer Katie Richardson, and, fresh from success with Ionesco’s Rhino, director Patrick J O’Reilly.
Taking an oblique way into the Brothers Grimm’s familiar yarn, O’Neill cleverly frames her reshaping with the conceit of a book’s potential as a portal into the magical other-world of Fairytale Town: “the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, are inside”.
It’s a notion the clearly satisfied younger audience members took to with greater relish than the trio of sceptical, social media-savvy early-teenage girls who were my companions. Richardson and O’Reilly’s appeal to their sensibilities, via a punched-up, beat-driven score and glancing allusions to their magical touchstone of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts (abetted by Stuart Marshall’s imaginative set and Mary Tumelty’s atmospheric lighting), were never going to breach the gap. That said, they took away the rousing show closer "What’s Your Story?" as an unqualified high point. Praise from such quarters is praise indeed.
Due acknowledgment of the audience’s adult contingent is meted out in well-received, if all too few, asides and quips—perhaps wary of straying too deliberately into panto territory—that garnered knowing laughter.
A six-strong cast take to O’Reilly’s hectic pace and Richardson’s amplified vigour with admirable commitment, although with O’Neill and the Grimms never quite fully integrated, there are lapses of coherence, and some lost words swamped by the over-amplified pre-recorded soundtrack. Even so, enough delights the eye—not least Gillian Lennox's clever, colour-saturated costumes—and tickles funny bones to provide a fun if somewhat frantic family outing.
Conor Quinn’s bullied boy turned amiable rodent, Monty, proves an ardent and amiable companion as reality gives way to fantasy, Odhrán McNulty’s Hansel and Catriona McFeely’s Gretel sparring with each other with recognisably change-on-a-sixpence sibling competitiveness.
Enthusiastic support is provided by the multi-tasking trio of Orla Gormley, who wears Uncle Dan’s moustache with masculine aplomb and brings boo-hiss menace to the ravenous witch, Mark Dugdale’s feline Minx and silky, suave bat Bertie, and Christina Nelson’s Evil Aunt, chirruping Koo and busy-beaver Chip, all winningly vying for scene-stealing honours.