“A tuneful, beautifully produced comedy adventure…” Hex at the National Theatre is a magical seasonal treat.
📍The Olivier Theatre, National Theatre, London
📅 26 Nov to 14 Jan
💷 From £10
🕖 2:00pm & 7:15pm
🕖 Running time (approx.): 2 hours 30 minutes (one interval)
🎬 Lyrics/ Director: Rufus Norris
🎬 Composer: Jim Fortune
🛠️ Book: Tanya Ronder
❕ Original concept: Katrina Lindsay & Rufus Norris
✂️ Set and Costume Designer: Katrina Lindsay
✂️ Choreographer: Jade Hackett
🎂 8+
🎭 Captioned Mon 19 Dec 7.15pm, Audio Described & Touch Tour Sat 7 Jan 2pm – Touch Tour at 12.30pm (call to book)
🎭 BSL Interpreted Thur 29 Dec 7.15pm, Sensory Adapted performance Thur 22 Dec 7.15pm
Originally intended for an ultimately Covid-plagued 2021 season, Rufus Norris’s musical extravaganza Hex looks set to complete the Christmas season at the second time of asking. A re-imagined vision of Sleeping Beauty, Hex retains many of the familiar elements, not least a sleeping beauty, a suitably handsome prince, a clutch of fairies, and lashings of magic and adventure. Ronder and Norris however, ill-content with one dimensional villain, impossibly virtuous hero, nor feckless damsel in distress, dare to tell quite a different story.
Enter Fairy (Neïma Naouri 8th of Dec – covering for Lisa Lambe), wingless relation of the soaring high fairies who think her an embarrassment. Descending from high to open the show arrayed in abundantly of shimmering gowns, and led by Olivia Saunders (covering for Kate Parr 8th Dec), this angelic choir are picture perfect fairy godmother material.
Their blessings upon plant, animal, or human are summed up in opening number ‘Nature of the Beast’ an admirably subversive anthem couched in lush Disney tones. The High Fairies bless to save man, and beast from their inherently base natures, not so Fairy. Arrayed in haphazard froufrou, Fairy finds no fault in nature, and blesses only to enhance and cultivate the natural order; she’s also somewhat error prone. So naive is she, that when asked to make a supplicant ‘hot’, she promptly sets them on fire.
Thus when Royal courtier Smith (Michael Matus), comes seeking a fairy to bless the royal baby in the nearby castle, our innocent protagonist is easily flattered into acquiescence. Naouri’s yearning take on ‘The One’ hits the spot. It might be a reasonably typical ‘I want’ song — but it’s a big number and she rises to it with more than sufficient vocal power.
Queen Regina (also a tireless Olivia Saunders) and King Rex (Kody Mortimer), it transpires, want baby Rose (Rosie Graham) to sleep, preferably 12 hours a night, and ideally on command. When they try to force Fairy to oblige, she cracks and hex’s the baby to prick her finger on her 16th birthday, and to only wake in answer to a heroic prince’s kiss.
Far from an unapologetic villain, Fairy will spend the remainder of the musical desperately trying to put things right, but she will do so without magic. For when fairies cast a hex in this universe, they lose their magic forever.
It is, in The QR’s opinion, a far more interesting and promising premise than that underlying 2014 hit movie, Maleficent. In place of vengeance and redemption, this is a story of good intentions, and the messy hell which they pave the way towards. Naouri is a delight, her Fairy a relatably vulnerable, but indomitable soul, her voice a character-rich and potent instrument. Yes, she’s a mess, but she refuses to give up, not when faced with a capering troupe of thorns growing up about the palace, not when they send each idiot prince who appears to sleep, not even when a pregnant Queenie (Victoria Hamilton-Barritt), queen of ogres, turns up pregnant and demanding help to avoid eating her half-human baby post-partum.
In fact in this last occurrence, Fairy spies an opportunity, for Queenie proves immune to the thorns, and Fairy reasons so might be her half-ogre prince of a son. Fairy’s well intentioned web grows ever more tangled as she practices to revive her sleeping beauty.
What follows is one part comedy of errors, one part love story, and one part life lesson. Cleverly, Ronder and Norris eschew finding trouble in pairing the grown Prince Bert (Michael Elcock) and a kiss-awakened Rose, and save it instead for the familial fall-out when confronting Queenie with a human wife, and the two babies they’ve produced behind her back, during a 2 year relationship.
It doesn’t take long for the ogress to realise Fairy’s designs on her only son, nor for her monstrous nature to roar back into fill the rent in her abruptly broken heart.
This is a musical unafraid to take its drama, and comedy to very dark places, nor from having Fairy make some highly dubious choices in order to avert absolute disaster (In fact she makes one decision regarding a servant’s beloved rat that left the audience audibly troubled). Of course, being a Festive offering for those 8 and over, Hex does ultimately find a happy ending, but the path there is…philosophically challenging. However in a world filled with human eating ogres, and magic-wieldng fairies, the scope for disaster amongst familial melodrama would be supercharged one supposes.
The Olivier Theatre proves an ideal setting for the show, a thrusting circular set placing the drama out amidst the audience. Katrina Lindsay’s cleverly rotating outer ring is put to good use time and again, saving the cast from marching on the spot to convey journeys, and presenting dynamic opportunities to choreographer Jade Hacket. The set pieces are certainly delivered with aplomb, the best probably a Madness-esque caper from the Thorns, led by Bruiser (a fabulous Mark Oxtoby), singing ‘Good Morning’ to a befuddled Fairy. The ensemble exhibit endless energy from start to end be it as feather be-hatted court lackeys, feckless princes, or woodland creatures, every movement intentional, each dance tight, and well executed.
Hex isn’t a simple story, and perhaps a surfeit of plot requires a little too much exposition to define the stakes post-intermission, but at least this is a family show with genuine levels of complexity. The orchestra Tarek Merchant are an absolute dream of lush woodwinds and dancing mandolins, and if the soundtrack tends towards highly competent rather than earth-shattering, it is still beautifully orchestrated by Simon Hale. Hex consistently sounds good, the singers accompanied, never competed with. and so bravo to the sound design team led by Simon Baker.
It’s also refreshing to find British dialects, and not learned Californian accents dominant in the sung performance. These familiar tones ground the show in place, and further remove it from Disney’s erstshile strangehold. The vocal honours ultimately must go to a thrilling Victoria Hamilton-Barritt, who delivers the soul-searching ‘In the Middle’ and octave ranging ‘I Know What I Am’ with convition and tonal mastery. The term tour de force is overused perhaps, but her performance deserves no less an epithet.
In short, if Hex isn’t the most hummable musical, it is nonetheless a tuneful, beautifully produced comedy adventure populated by interesting, complex characters and performed by a seriously talented cast. It’s continually, and surprisingly funny, heart-warming, thought-provoking, and most certainly worth your consideration this Christmas.
Photography Credits: Mihaela Bodlovic & Lyceum Theatre Twitter feed)
By
