I went last night to see Kneehigh Theatre's production of The Wild Bride at the Berkeley Rep. I had been looking forward to this show for months, because I had seen Kneehigh's Brief Encounter (twice!) during its run at ACT a couple of years ago. I loved the imaginative way various media were woven together and especially the way all the actors also danced and sang and played instruments. Music was cleverly and seamlessly integrated into the performance, and the whole thing was delightful. So too with this new show.
The Wild Bride is a retelling of the apparently little-known fairy tale called "The Handless Maiden" (We attended the post-performance chat, and no one else in the audience was familiar with the story.) As a folklorist—and especially as a folklorist who studied with Alan Dundes—I remember the story well ("Das Mädchen ohne Hände"—for some reason, I even remember its German title!).
As with all traditional tales, the story's form varies in different times and different places, but the gist is that a young girl is living with her widowed father. He either decides to marry her, or he is tricked into selling her to the devil. To escape, she cuts off her hands—or has them cut off—and flees into the forest. There she survives until a prince espies her stealing fruit from his trees. He falls in love with her and marries her, despite her missing hands and the fact that she is mute. He has artificial hands fashioned for her, and they live together happily enough. While she is pregnant, he is called away for an extended time. In his absence, she gives birth to a son. The devil intervenes in an exchange of letters between the prince and the queen—who in some versions is jealous and/or suspicious of her daughter-in-law—causes the queen to try to kill the heroine and her child. They escape into the forest, and a deer's eyes and tongue are substituted as proof of the princess's death. In the wild, the heroine cares for her infant son, and in some versions her hands are miraculously restored. When the prince returns to the palace, he is distraught to learn that his family is dead, and he goes mad into the forest. He eventually meets with his wife and son, and the family is reunited.
This story, perhaps to a greater degree than many folktales—or perhaps not (I need to think more about this)—allows for a wide range of interpretation in the telling. It's the how and why of the events that provide the nuance and meaning to the story:
- Why were the girl's hands cut off? Who did it?
- Why does the prince fall in love with her?
- What is the source of the antagonism between the queen and the bride?
- Does the young woman recover her hands? How and why and when does this happen?
I was fascinated to note during the chat that one of the audience members asked about the "edginess" of the father-daughter relationship, which she read as loving but also perhaps inappropriately sensual. The actors responded that there was no specific intent to portray anything other than a loving relationship between the characters. But they also noted that some of their on-stage interaction was based on the actor's rough-and-tumble play with his own daughters—and that perhaps the fact that the actress was not a child but a 27-year-old woman complicated the way their physical interaction came across to the audience. But most interesting to me was the fact that even though incest was not an overt motif in the play, it was still intuited by the audience.
Storyteller Susan Gordon, in an article in Feminist Messages: Coding in Women's Folk Culture, discusses her own telling of the story as a means of reclaiming the heroine's agency in the face of abuse. Many have argued that fairy tales depict women primarily as passive victims of circumstance, and "The Handless Maiden" can offer a particularly extreme version of this image. But Gordon found a way to shape the details of the narrative so as to return a measure of autonomy to the victimized woman and thus to transform her listeners' experience of the story.
Kneehigh takes another tack by emphasizing the character of the devil. He becomes the source of all the heroine's woes: he tricks her father into giving her to him and then forces him to cut off his daughter's hands; he rewrites the prince's letters to his mother, insisting that she slay his wife and child. This leaves the human characters largely blameless ("The devil made me do it!"). In this telling, everyone is victimized by the devil—though the heroine suffers most profoundly by his meddling.
In an inspired move, the heroine is played by three actresses, one for each of the three periods of her life (as a girl in her father's house; in the wild of the forest and as a wife in the castle; in the wild again). The actresses often move/dance in synch, which adds weight and power to this character and offers an impression of female solidarity—particularly when she/they finally beat the devil. It also suggests the changing complexity of an individual life, and the way we carry our past selves with us, even as we evolve over time.
One other wonderful detail (among so many) in this production: the queen is depicted by a life-size painted portrait, with an actress's hands poking through the painting. It creates a wonderful contrast between the handless heroine and the queen, who is nothing but hands. I'm not sure what this means, if anything, but it was a great touch.
Lots more to say about this terrific show (and I need to dig up those articles to refresh my memory on the details), but my key message is this: You should go see it!
