My most-cancelled show of the Christmas season - I had to reschedule it twice - the National Theatre's new musical Hex has missed so much of its planned run that what's left is now being considered a preview, prior to it returning for what they'll be hoping will be a more successful second try at the end of the year. This is probably for the best - I'd hazard a guess that composer Jim Fortune, book writer Tanya Ronder and lyricist/director Rufus Norris will be giving it a few tweaks between now and then. Whether the promising premise can actually be converted into a hit is another story. Hex applies to Charles Perrault's Sleeping Beauty the central conceits of two of the most popular fairytale musicals of all time: The revisionist take on a character usually seen as the villain, most famously used in Wicked, and the second act exploring what happens after the Happy-Ever-After, as used in Into the Woods.A lonely, wingless and underpowered Fairy (Rosalie Craig) lives in the woods until she's sought out by a King and Queen (Shaq Taylor and Daisy Maywood) whose daughter refuses to sleep. But Fairy's magic can only make her sleep if the baby herself wants to, and baby Rose is already too keen to explore the world to rest. Under pressure, Fairy's blessing is accidentally expressed as a curse: If the child is pricked by a rose thorn before she turns sixteen, she'll be frozen in eternal sleep until a prince's kiss wakes her.
Princess Rose (Kat Ronney) inevitably succumbs to the curse on its very last day, and Fairy is determined to find her a prince to reverse her mistake. But for reasons best described as "*cough* LOOK OVER THERE!" a sentient thornbush led by Bruiser (Delroy Atkinson) attacks the suitors, pricking them and sending them into the same hexed sleep as the princess. Eventually the Fairy decides to play a long game, when pregnant ogress Queenie (Tamsin Carroll) comes to her for help because she's worried she'll want to eat her half-human baby when it's born: When the little prince grows up his half-ogre blood will make him immune to the thorns' poison, and he'll be the one to rescue the princess. Which only takes us up to the interval, after which Rose and Prince Bert (Michael Elcock) have to negotiate the pitfalls left by the Fairy's well-intentioned manipulations. In other words Hex deals with some of the oldest questions in fiction, like "EH?" and "WHAT?"
The National's got a mixed history with its big family Christmas shows: They're generally well-received, but always have to take comparison to the critical and commercial success of War Horse and His Dark Materials. Both those shows had a distinct dark side, and I think this difficult balance family shows have, of having to appeal to wildly varying age groups, is one area where Hex struggles the most: Fortune's songs are largely in the DisneyTM mould, with a couple of showstoppers for the cast to belt out but nothing overly memorable. The tone isn't quite DisneyTM though, and the attempts to balance different moods are clumsy: Smith-Smith (Sargon Yelda) howling in despair as the Fairy butchers all his animal friends* is, for me, a moment that crosses over from the dark fairytale into the genuinely unpleasant to watch; it's also bookended by fart jokes.
Although the first act's revisionist look at the Fairy works well enough, in the second Ronder and RuNo discover that giving a simple fairytale a more complex sequel is harder than it looks (even Into the Woods only gets away with it because its story is consciously chaotic.) You can feel the story straining as it tries to make sense, and the various distracting staging oddities don't help: Why is Katrina Lindsay's main design motif wooden wheels reminiscent of a spinning wheel, when the story's spindle has been replaced by thorns? And Smith-Smith's job in Queenie's castle appears to be to operate the stage's revolve, which begs the question DOES THE REVOLVE EXIST IN-UNIVERSE? Because these characters are not the kind of genre-savvy to know they need to occasionally rotate the castle to give the audience a better view. "Get back to work, quick! Rose needs to look like she's walking without actually going anywhere!" The passage of time is also very unclear - I didn't realise until much later that several generations had passed while Rose slept.
Some of Hex's good intentions are well-realised; it gives its three biggest roles to women, who inevitably rise to the challenge, especially Craig as the not-quite-sane Fairy. And the story nicely plays with the question of what happens to the incidental characters a fairytale discards along the way - all the unsuccessful princes who wake up when the spell breaks are left hanging around as Rose and Bert have their adventures. Incongruous wheels aside, Lindsay's designs are also often stunning. It's a watchable couple of hours, although the time doesn't exactly speed by and the second act's heavy-handed darkness starts to try the patience. The time between now and its reopening might mean the creatives can make enough changes to avoid a critical mauling, but I still suspect they're looking at nonplussed reviews at best. It's not a complete washout and tonight's audience were very enthusiastic, but Hex shows the influence of the shows it's trying to emulate a bit too obviously, as well as demonstrating that the magic tricks they pulled off aren't as easy as they might look.
Hex by Tanya Ronder, Jim Fortune and Rufus Norris is booking until the 22nd of January at the National Theatre's Olivier.
Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Brinkhoff-Möegenburg.
*SPOILER ALERT: Smith-Smith does not have a fun time of it. Not only are his friends killed, cooked and eaten, but the ogress then regurgitates their half-digested corpses onto him. At the end he gets a happy ending though - does the Fairy bring his friends back to life? No, she just makes him stop smelling of vomit.
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