The Girl with the Iron Claws is the first production from The Wrong Crowd, a collaboration between puppet-maker and designer Rachael Canning and writer and director Hannah Mulder. The influence of a maker at the core of the process is much in evidence in the effortlessly aesthetic set: a striking pair of brass spindly ‘claws’ is lit on a plinth centre-stage as we come in, flanked by four old wooden ladder ‘trees’ topped by hat-stand ‘branches’ and glittering dully with an array of old fashioned hooks and tools. The evocative naturalistic mask of the show’s key puppet figure – an enormous white bear conjured by mask and a single paw – are also stunningly designed and constructed. The effective use of this technique to conjure this and the main antagonist figure, an over-sexed troll princess, allows for some exciting shifts in scale that support and enliven the piece’s ambitious storytelling.
The company’s stated aim is to ‘reinvigorate some of the wild old stories’ and this is certainly not a fairytale I‘ve encountered before. Any elements of surprise though were tempered by its many stock traits – ugly jealous sisters, a doting father, a transformed hero, and mystical repetition in three parts. Though the direction kept the pace lively and largely managed to avoid the tediousness of such a structure, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, for all its slickness, I didn’t know why the company were telling me this story. Where was the urgency in choosing this one to stage?
The cast of four offer nicely controlled performances, that scroll through a diverse range of physical and vocal characterisations with some strong comedic turns and some powerfully throaty singing that further lifts the dynamism of the whole.
But there are one or two production lapses. For some reason the aesthetic sense of the production so lavishly developed elsewhere collapses in the puppet children that critically people the second half of the storytelling. These are constructed from yellow foam and plastic tubing, the visual antithesis of the rest of the staging’s rich natural tones, and they are too jointed for one person to effectively manipulate, leading to some scrappy puppetry. Elsewhere, a moment that feels intended to transcend – when three performers take on the beautifully made feet of the polar bear to execute a cross country run – fails to hit its mark as the legs are all out of rhythm. I also really wanted to see the set used more – a curtain threaded on the diagonal effectively supports some visual surprises and everything is elegantly choreographed, but at times the set feels more decorative than functional. These are nitpicking points, in what is overall an enjoyable and professionally produced first show, but a company being lauded for demonstrating the hipness of visual theatre tropes to a new generation of theatre-makers and audiences should be pushed to really show what the form can do.