Lovely Ottawa spring

Guest Theatre Review: The Changeling

If there had been aquavit and herring on offer I might have moved mountain and earth to attend; as it was, life interfered in my enjoyment of the NAC's production of The Changeling, a gloriously horrific children's tale as only a Swede could tell it. Loathe to waste tickets, a friend's friend and her three children — two boys aged 12 and nine, and a girl aged seven-and-a-half — attended the opening production tonight.

Based on a tale by writer Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature — in the early 1900s no less, more reasons for me to be proud of my Swedish heritage, the story has gruesome, grotesque and dark characters reflective of Norse mythology, which children adore despite parents' fears of nightmares.

This is their review as synthesized by their mother:



"First things first: the kids loved the baby troll. Who knew a grown man could play a baby troll so convincingly? He was gross and funny and even kind of cute. But when I say gross, I mean really gross. At one point, my daughter couldn't even look and I only looked so I could tell her when to open her eyes again. That point came after an incident with a dead rat that squirted blood when Troll bit into him.
The kids also enjoyed the music and found the songs interesting even though "they were in Swedish and we don't understand Swedish."
And, we all loved the comic relief and rhyming ineptitude of the cat and goose. They made it a child's play.
Unfortunately, the kids unanimously disliked the character of Niels — the human baby that comes back at the end of the play as a boy. They have been mocking his sadly unconvincing (they call it sarcastic) delivery of the line: What burns brighter than the fire of love?
Now, back to the troll. He was grotesque and kids love grotesque; they will talk about that all weekend. It doesn't matter that the parents' acting was consistently and highly overwrought, or that the mother's love for the boy was not credible, or that the parents' relationship issues seem to come out of the blue and go all over the place.* The troll was grotesque, and that's the best part.
I've attached a photo of the note my daughter wrote. The graphic expression defies transcription (though I wish the spelling were better...). "

I suddenly feel a compelling need to go.