The Snow Spider

Tristan Bates Theatre, London

The Snow Spider, adapted from Jenny Nimmo’s children’s novel by Delyth Jones and James Lark, and presented by the Io Theatre Company, is a ‘total theatre’ concoction, meshing physical theatre, music, song and text effortlessly and imaginatively. Gwyn Griffiths (Joey Hickman) is given a peculiar group of presents on his ninth birthday, each carrying a profound symbolic meaning. The play shows what he encounters as he engages with the deeper implications of each and how his engagement impacts on family and neighbours in this rural community in darkest Wales. Each present is like a portal to another world.

There is magic in the air: his grandmother, Nain (Anne-Marie Piazza, in commanding form) is a teller of tales and a wannabe witch. A running joke is that every spell she casts fails to work. Or does it? Throughout the piece there is the unsettling weaving of the magical within the everyday, in the action as much as in the dialogue. Day to day living is interwoven with archetypal transformative moments and strange visitings.

Gwyn’s kaleidoscope is metaphorical of the play’s structure: shifting patterns merging colourfully into the next. Sometimes the thread of the story gets lost amid all the singing and the musicianship, not to mention rather too many storms for my liking, but the virtuosic ability of the gifted ensemble cast is never in doubt in the clever way they conjure these up through voice, movement and sound.

The snow spider itself seems to be the threshold guardian to that other world where, it seems, Gwyn’s sister Bethan disappeared four years earlier on a mountain walk. The play is a study of the effects of the web of grief on a simple tight-knit community and what might be considered to be a few desperate ways out of it. I was reminded of Synge’s Riders to the Sea at one point but the play has much stronger echoes of J.M. Barrie’s Mary Rose, leitmotifs from Celtic folklore, a dash of African voodoo and even a sprinkling of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Delyth Jones directs a rather sprawling script with finesse and imaginative delicacy and James Lark supplies atmospheric and discordant music. For me, the play would have been even more engaging had there been no interval and a more compact, focused version played through in one act. The ensemble work is faultless and Joey Hickman is a winning and believable Gwyn. Helena Gullan shines as Eirlys who may or may not be Bethan brought back to unearthly life. Philip Benjamin shows much versatility as the Dad and a threatening old-style schoolmaster. The school and playground scenes are hilarious and horribly recognisable. Nearly everyone, I think, plays a musical instrument and Anneke Hodnett on the harp produces some very other-worldly sounds in keeping with the play’s shadow-land of dream and reality.

Designer Florence Hazard has created a cluttered set emblematic of stuff caught up in a spider’s web. It is fascinating to see how the cast deploy every prop as the story unfolds and, indeed, create new ones with what’s on hand. I particularly liked the sparkling snow spider which seems to scuttle here there and everywhere.  Overall, an evening of theatrical magic: innovative and dark.

4 stars

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