© Johan Persson 'Faeries' reviews Broom in reviews recent William Tuckett reviews more Jeffery Taylor reviews Web version held on Ballet.co by kind permission of Jeffery Taylor and the Sunday Express Express Website

The magic of Faeries, like all great stories, is not in the plot but in the telling. Tuckett’s conception of how to present the fairly hum drum tale of lost children and battling good and evil fairy forces, goes way beyond age groups and into the mature stratosphere of high quality. World War II evacuee Edie, 10, (Charlotte Broom) loses brother Tom, 7, (Josef Perou) at Paddington Station and ends up in Kensington Gardens. Immediately Michael Vale’s stage design is eerily evocative; twisted roots are a station colonnade then a blink later, earthy undergrowth. The versatile cast of performers play humans and monsters while also operating Blind Summit Theatre’s utterly believable puppets. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s rhyming script is clear and unpatronising though occasionally obscured by Martin Ward’s music.

But it is Tuckett who gathers these varied ethereal strands of whimsy and produces a convincing, moving and completely absorbing 75 minutes. Broom is a buxom child with an obtrusive glottal stop, but naturally captures the naivety of Tuckett’s choreography while the likeable Stuart Angell fulfils the role of 103-year-old monster, Gluck, whose good nature Edie reveals by baking his first birthday cake. Gluck’s maverick minded tail is a stroke of pure genius. The puppet operators speak both dialogue and commentary but so focused is the action, so perfect the pace it is the marionettes that effortlessly carry the story line. Villain Dolour, hungry to suck the life out of child Edie, has a decaying caterpillar’s body and looks like Nosferatu with up to three heads depending on his mood. And guess what? arch manipulator Tuckett makes us sorry for the nasty old devil when he gets his come uppance. Then there’s Drone, a squashy faced portly old sprite who lives in a disused fairy well with the Golden Coffin as a dining table – don’t ask.

Charlotte Broom as Edie with Anak in Faeries
© Johan Persson

But the star of the show is 18” high fairy Anak. A feisty whisp as bald as a billiard ball, she cannot fly after tearing her wings on broken glass discarded by “an oink of a human”. Anak nearly dies imprisoned by Dolour in a glass jar, her tiny voice crying “help me” like The Fly trapped in the spider’s web. Faeries may be a kid’s happy-ever-after fragment but it is a grown up triumph for Tuckett.