Theatre review: The Book of Dust - La Belle Sauvage

The last of what were meant to be my Christmas shows that got bumped into January sees Nicholas Hytner at the Bridge revisit one of his biggest successes from his time at the National Theatre: He and playwright Nicholas Wright turned Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy into an epic two-part play, and a production I still remember fondly. Bryony Lavery now takes over adaptation duties for Pullman's prequel, The Book of Dust - La Belle Sauvage, which takes the story back to Lyra's world. It's an alternate universe where the Church - known as the Magisterium - has an authoritarian grip on all aspects of life, which in this even darker take on the world includes a fascistic private army, as well as a junior version that encourages schoolchildren to turn their parents and peers in to the authorities for perceived offences against the Magisterium. But the most obvious difference between this world and Lyra's is a physical one.

Theatre review: Philip Pullman's Grimm Tales

An adaptation of an adaptation at Shoreditch Town Hall: Philip Pullman recently published his own retelling of the classic fairytales by the Brothers Grimm, Grimm Tales for Young and Old, and it's these versions of the stories that Philip Wilson has adapted for an immersive theatre version in the old building's basements. As seems to now be the law, the audience is colour-coded into groups - only two this time, red and black, as there's just two teams of four actors each to tell the stories. Five of the Grimms' tales have been chosen, two of them among the most famous fairytales in the world, one ("The Juniper Tree") that I was slightly familiar with, and two that as far as I can remember I hadn't heard before. The black group started with the familiar "Rapunzel," told by the team of Ashley Alymann, Sabina Arthur, James Byng and Lyndsay Dukes.