When the curtain goes up on this Caledonian Snow Queen, the view is both familiar and strange. Familiar, because we recognise the austere silhouette of Edinburgh’s Castle Rock at the back of Emily James’s set, as well as the curve of the theatre’s balcony reflected back at us as if we were looking in a mirror. But strange, because the rococo flourishes of the balcony seem to be morphing into the sides of a sledge. Lizzie Powell’s lights turn them an icy turquoise. Imagination has taken a grip on this looking-glass landscape.
There is something familiar and strange too about Morna Young’s adaptation, staged by Cora Bissett in a bold, expansive and richly musical production. She follows Hans Christian Andersen’s tale in outline with the expected story of 12-year-old Gerda (Rosie Graham) whose best friend Kei (Sebastian Lim-Seet) has been captured and corrupted by the Snow Queen (Claire Dargo). But in detail, she takes a wintry route of her own.
Setting the story in the late 19th century, when the Forth rail bridge was still a novelty, she sends Gerda on an epic quest into a mythical Scotland. Rooted and serious-minded, Graham’s Gerda draws on her love of botany and thirst for adventure to track down her friend via steam train, cross-country skis, fishing boat and the back of a unicorn.
She is helped by talking flowers in Perth, a gang of robbers in the Cairngorms, a wise man in the North Sea and a seer deep in the Highlands. There are fairies, sky warriors and a duplicitous corbie. And behind the Snow Queen is Beira, the Celtic queen of winter. Young has a rich Scots palate to match (enemies range from a “sleekit beastie” to a “crabbit hag”) and composer Finn Anderson takes it further with a set of songs that lean in to the windswept landscapes of Scottish folk.
As the children’s foe, Dargo is all the more chilling for playing the Snow Queen as halfway rational, although her ice palace seems more like an open prison than an evil lair. All the same, Gerda has ample chance to prove her mettle, making her reunion with Lim-Seet’s cello-playing Kei as warming as it is well deserved.
At the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 31 December
