REVIEWS: Places I Never Think About at Lion & Unicorn Theatre / Camden Fringe 14-17 August 2023

‘Unresolved old folktales are given life with puppetry, song, acting and creativity which certainly brought happiness to the audience tonight’ …

Baba Yaga was a child eating witch who lived in a house that stood on chicken legs – or so we were told as children. My grandmother’s attempts to make us stop talking and go to sleep with this story I found, were not only limited to Lithuania but were being echoed in one form or another all over Eastern Europe. The director, Joanna Woznicka, herself Polish, informed me that versions of this old Slavic tale were common as far away as Croatia. And so it was into this familiar world that myself and an enthusiastic audience were taken. Led into a fairytale land of folktales we were treated initially to three stories.

The first was of a king and queen who have a baby boy who grows up into the handsome prince. Three old crones in colourful headscarves babbled intermittently between the action, telling the tale in a mix of Hungarian, Romanian and Croatian. Breaking out occasionally into song they filled the room with sound, sometimes eerie, at other times joyful but always with the accompaniment of a solo violin contributing sound effects as well as punctuation.

In the second story a king falls in love with a horse. She runs away to have a baby in a tree. He grows up, uproots the tree, perhaps as a metaphor for a life uprooted through immigration. He meets two men who he becomes very friendly with, touching on, not for the only time in the play, the subject of queerness. He then departs alone to the underworld to do we know not what. An open ending often leaves one with a question. As in the first story where the handsome prince goes off to hunt a rabbit, but we are never told of the outcome. Leaving a storyline unresolved these days, in film at least when it rarely does happen, prepares us for the inevitable sequel. But here, for now, we are left hanging.

In the last story a woman on an island has a baby – she leaves but is home-sick for the island and the familiar sound of the sea. Finally, when the stories are over, the last part of the play brings together the actors to reflect upon their present lives. A clarinet and guitar struggle to converse with each other. A song tries to make sense of new surroundings and identity. Do they try to make connections between their new lives and those of the characters in the stories they heard in childhood? Perhaps those unresolved old folktales have endings that are played out in the present day by the immigrants who carry the adventures in their childhood memories. They gave those endings life with their puppetry, song, acting and creativity, which certainly brought happiness to the audience tonight, but also asked of them a deeper understanding of some of the more topical subjects touched on by this play.

Directed by Joanna Woznicka

Producer, Director, Writer and Script Consultant based in London and Berlin

Twitter: @JoannaPWoznicka

Reviewed by Robert Lanachan