It’s fitting that on the press night of The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh’s annual Christmas production, the clear, starry night brought with it a seasonally icy chill. Yet the frosty cold outside did little to cool the warmth and cheer of the theatre, or dampen the enthusiasm with which they put on their new adaptation of The Snow Queen.
Relocated to Victorian era Edinburgh, the story finds tweenage pals Gerda (Rosie Graham) and Kai (Sebastian Lim-Seet) sharing a garret roof-garden between their homes and dream of futures beyond their working-class means. Meanwhile, the shenanigans of mischievous trolls, with a magic mirror, have corrupted Beira (Claire Dargo), the winter goddess, turning her into the cold and heartless Snow Queen. Through her evil plan to cover the world in an everlasting winter, she poisons Kai with shards of evil glass and steals him away to her icy kingdom. With only hope and love in her heart, it’s up to Gerda and what friends and skills she can muster along the way to rescue Kai and put the world to rights again.
Morna Young’s reinterpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic winter tale eschews the more Christian iconography of the story, and imbues it with a more pastoral and distinctly pagan festive magic recalling the pre-Celtic seasonal mythology of Beira, the Cailleach Bheur, but with something distinctly more modern in this retelling, drawing on some aspects that have entered the public consciousness from other works derived from the same source.
If C S Lewis borrowed from Andersen when he created Jadis, the White Witch holding Narnia under a spell of eternal winter, and her garden of petrified enemies, then Young has allowed a little of this to seep back into The Snow Queen, particularly the raising of the stakes with a spell of eternal winter. In Young’s play, the good winter spirit Berda has herself been corrupted by the Troll’s mirror shards and in her cold fury has cursed the world to a spell of endless snow and frost. But the similarities don’t end there. The Queen’s frozen enemies ape the Witch’s statue garden, and the bickering with her familiar, Corbie, delightfully echoes the barbed prattle between Lewis’s Witch and her accomplice Ginarrbrik.
There’s also been a conscious effort to make sure this is a deliberately and understandably Scottish retelling of the story. Aside from the journey taking place across Scotland, rather than the Norwegian archipelago, there’s been care taken to ensure that regional accents are played up, particularly as Gerda sojourns northward, so an increasing amount of Doric creeps into the text. It’s a fun idea, and makes sense coming from Young, an issue being that at times it becomes almost unintelligible, even though this is at one point deliberate, which means at moments, it’s a struggle to fight through the language and past the occasionally echo-laden reproduction of the sound through the house speakers.
There’s also an inconsistency to the depth of accent-work in Gerda and Kai, meaning at times they speak fairly formal English, and at others toss in almost full sentences of harder Leithy dialect, seemingly at random. It’s not a huge deal-breaker, but anyone not fairly travelled or familiar with Scottish slang may struggle with this, and being a family show, might hamper the fuller enjoyment of the younger children.
But for the most part, this is actually a roughly close retelling of the episodic quest of young Gerda to find and free her friend from certain doom capably directed by Cora Bisset, who clearly has aimed to straddle the line between making The Snow Queen a festive family musical and harking toward the feel of a Christmas panto. This is really where the piece excels, with an absolute highlight being Richard Conlon’s Hamish the Horny Horse, a campy and lusty Unicorn who helps out Gerda. He becomes the comic relief of the show, cracking puns and making vague allusions to all manner of torrid affairs in an offhand manner which will look zoom straight over the heads of children, but will see their parents cackling and snorting into their programmes.
Patrons young and old will equally be having fun with the lively and diverse musical numbers that pepper the performance with Young's lyrics put to foot-stomping music by Finn Anderson, and bound together in the hands of musical director Shonagh Murray, who recently brought similar brilliance to both God Catcher and The Grand Old Opera House Hotel in this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
It’s also worth pointing out the brilliant simplicity of Emily James’s set design with an upper balcony built to mirror the balconies of the Lyceum, making it seem like the theatre itself continues into the world of the play, aided by simple but effective descending scenery that moves through the play’s various locations simply and clearly.
All in all, this is a fine piece of festive fun, filled with wit, charm and song. It cracks along with rambunctious glee at great pace for the first act. While it struggles to return to momentum in the second act, it makes up for it with a finale that manages to tie up the loose ends, pay off the dues left to Andersen’s story and manage to work in hopeful aspirational messages and musical frolics that will see that the audience leaves on a high note.
Is it the greatest Christmas show ever seen? Perhaps not, but as you step out of the theatre onto the frost-glittered streets, it feels hard to imagine that you will get a more well-rounded and deliciously fun time in the theatre this winter.