Bleak tales offer little festive cheer

RATS’ TALES, Royal Exchange, Manchester
SOME theatres work hard to please their audience at Christmas; some go a different way.

The Royal Exchange has never, until this year, worried about attracting family audiences and has gone in its own rather noble direction with classic, oddball and sometimes just plain zany choices, always aimed at adult audiences, usually very successfully.

This year the change of control, following the retirement of founding director Braham Murray, has presumably changed that policy — but I can’t help believing the new hierarchy needs to think a lot more about family shows before it does another.

The lure of having Poet Laureate and good friend of the Exchange, Carol Ann Duffy, write a new show — based on “The Pied Piper” and several of her own and other folk tales — must have been too great to resist. But I wish they had — or at least, had scheduled it for some other time of year.

For “Rats’ Tales” is almost unremittingly bleak: poetic maybe, cleverly designed and executed very smartly by a team of eight hard-working actors and director Melly Still, but still bleak, dark — both metaphorically and physically - too long and more than a little boring at times.

Though I accept the notion that children don’t always want sweetness and light and can be dark creatures themselves, it’s the absence of almost everything but gloom in this show that eventually begins to pall.

Starting with “The Pied Piper”, which is vengeful enough, the evening trawls through seven more — too many — equally off-kilter tales, only barely nodding in the direction of morals and uplifting endings in each case.

The first half ends with the story of the Changeling — a human child is stolen and a troll baby left in its place. The distraught human mother comes to accept and care for it, not realising her treatment of it will determine her own child’s fate.

As for humour, the highlight is in the second-half story of the “Squire’s Bride”, in which wires are crossed and a small mare dressed up by servants as the bride for the domineering squire.

Even here the comedy is that of revenge on the haughty master. This is a Christmas show without much cheer.