Hag - Underbelly, Edinburgh

This review was first published on the public reviews.

We all know the rules of fairytales. You can’t have light without dark, you can’t have a hero without a villain. Baba Yaga, the narrator of The Wrong Crowd’s new show, Hag is certainly a villain. She likes to eat children, in fact she likes nothing better than tucking into a plate of child’s intestine.
Yet it is Baba Yaga who tells this story, she is charismatic and knowing and she gets the best jokes forcing us to question this difference between the dark and the light.

Hag tells the story of Lisa, a young girl who loses her mother and ends up living with a vile stepmother (with a fantastically lofty fake bouffant) and her deliciously repulsive children. Her mother leaves her a mysterious doll to protect her and led by this doll, Lisa ends up walking into Baba Yaga’s skeleton ridden lair. However, instead of killing her straight away, Lisa is put to work on a series of trick laden tasks, the way she deals with these tasks unnerves our villain and leads helps Lisa to discover her hidden resources.

It was unfortunate that the sightlines in the Underbelly were restrictive, which blocked out much of the action on stage. The puppetry and set were beautifully crafted but the head design made it difficult to animate and thus connect with Baba Yaga and the character of Lisa was underdeveloped lacking the feisty qualities of most modern fairytale heroines. Hag contains lots of ideas and striking images but more is needed to move us.

http://www.thepublicreviews.com/hag-underbelly-edinburgh/