I sat in a fully packed Barnfield Theatre on Friday to watch Three Snake Leaves, a retelling of one of the Brothers Grimm’s most famous fairytales. The lady sat one seat along assured me that she personally knew the artists – whom, she explained, were professional storytellers, not actors –and advised me not to take too many notes and simply enjoy myself. So that’s what I did, and what followed were two hours of magical delight.
The stage set-up was simple: four chairs and more instruments than you could count on two hands were scattered across the stage. Four performers came out: Ben Haggarty, Hugh Lupton and Sally Pomme Clayton – three storytellers of the renowned Crick Crack Club – alongside one musician: Sheema Mukherjee, whose on-stage performance gave the show an entrancing ambience. The Crick Crack Club, set up by Ben Haggarty in the eighties, has become a legendary hub for modern retellings of fairytales, folktales, myths and epics, as they tailor them to a more mature audience.
The Crick Crack Club, set up by Ben Haggarty in the eighties, has become a legendary hub for modern retellings of fairytales, folktales, myths and epics, as they tailor them to a more mature audience.
The show opened with an ode to the oral storytelling tradition: “When we tell a story, standing behind us is everyone who ever told that story before us,” one of the performers begins. He calls upon the women, who told these stories years ago whilst washing and cooking together, and the brothers Grimm, who wrote the stories down for us to enjoy. Between the three storytellers, they then artfully told the story of The Three Snake Leaves – a fairytale about a musician who runs into an eccentric group of lost travellers in the woods: a beggar who used to be a king; a beautiful woman with matted hair who is a runaway princess on the back of a donkey; and a blind man, who was once the royal shoemaker clinging to the animal’s tail. Over the course of 140 minutes, the storytellers unravelled the stories of the characters, recounting each of their falls from grace.
The interweaving stories were broken up by musical interludes, led by Mukherjee in which all the performers were involved. In the background too, traditional music created through the use of tambourines, drums, flutes and an electric guitar-looking instrument added to the mystical atmosphere of the stories; and instruments like bells, bird-imitating devices and even the simple bowl and spoon added a layer of immersive storytelling.
In the true German-Romantic Grimm style, the stories, although characterised as fairytales, are anything but simplistic or rose-coloured. They are complex, gruesome and cruel, yet wonderful. The storytellers, who, I can now say, were talented beyond compare, seemed made for the genre: whilst there was an element of performativity to their craft, the stories spoke for themselves and weren’t unnecessarily changed or embellished. In an interview conducted by Northcott Student Ambassadors Ashley Khoo and Holly Lobban, storyteller Hugh Lupton explains how “fairytales were never originally the province of childhood … they were told to all ages.” The show’s warnings for graphic scenes, themes of violence and incest were not misplaced, as I looked around at a gripped, mature audience.
The storytellers, who, I can now say, were talented beyond compare, seemed made for the genre.
The art form of professional storytelling left me spellbound. The low, measured voices, never exaggerated but beautifully enthralling, brought me right back to the audiobooks I would listen to on long car rides as kids. The hypnotising voices and suspenseful, immersive storylines had me sitting on the edge of my seat. This show was in many ways nostalgic yet simultaneously refreshing. If the Crick Crack Club are performing anywhere near you, I highly recommend that you check them out.
