Comedy Festival Review: The Hunting of the Snark

The Hunting of the Snark
Devised by The Playground Collective
8 - 12 May, 6.30pm
Bats Theatre

Playground Theatre - veterans of the Young and Hungry project - have adapted, dramatised and reinterpreted Lewis Carroll's famous poem for this production of The Hunting of the Snark. While the production often seemed more chaotic than nonsensical - especially in the earlier parts - it is full of energy, comes together in moments of real drama and comedy and offers some food for thought.

The Bellman, the Baker, the Butcher and so on appear in patchy greasepaint, their characters expanded in performance into a range of modern or semi-modern stock characters. The Bonnet-Maker, for example, is a Scandanavian fashionista. Boots is a crazed-American-Vietnam-vet style survivalist, his post-traumatic agony overplayed to just to the point of truth then absurbly undercut.

They are joined 'Gertrude Chataway', the Victorian girl for whom the story was made, who wanders through the action like a kind of trickster god as if the whole thing is for her benefit (which of course it is).

The island of the quest is also populated creatures like the Jub Jub Bird and the Jabberwocky (whose story is inserted into the action and freely interpreted) some remarkable, skeletal puppets with glowing eyes or beaks created by Kirsty Baxter.

Carroll's text is used freely, and it seemed to me the production was at its best when it stayed close, subversively or not, to Carroll's story. The further from that influence, the more the devisors seemed to want to actually shy away the abusurdity and make the characters behave like normal people.

Carroll structured entire scenes around puns and parodies, and this shows up in the devised work too. While the puns tend to be throwaways, there are a number of pop cultural references as well as ideas from other Carroll works (and judging by the uneven distribution of some of the laughter, some in-jokes too). One incident effectively referred to the scene in The Matrix that refers to Alice in Wonderland. Gertrude offers Bonnets a red pill and a blue pill: "One makes you smaller, the other makes you bigger."

The comic highlight was the well-executed musical-comedy style romantic song and dance between the Butcher and the Beaver, but the show really found its feet towards the end as a bleaker mood kicks in. The treasure-chest the Banker has obsessively pursued is empty; the Bellman, having lost his bell, gets it together to inspire his makeshift crew to return to the hunt just as it fails.

The company plays on this idea of futility in the poem, taking the nonsense seriously and making a kind of existential tragedy, culminating in a finely-staged ending that leaves us wondering if the Baker, who saw the Snark/Boojum then "softly and silently vanished away", isn't better of than those left behind.

The intensity, precision and potent imagery of this sequence stayed with me - the Baker stepping out of the auditorium towards the light of a snark; the lamps the crew carry snuffed out one by one as the poem ends. There are flashes of that kind of vision in the rest of the production, translating Carroll's words into a full stage experience or creating some new true absurdity - always performed with an endearing goodwill and enthusiasm.

Hunting of the Snark press release
NZ International Comedy Festival website

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