Theatre

The Year of Being a Squirrel

Alan Hindle | Sunday 14 August, 2011 13:16

Baba Yaga, a monstrous hag made of snot and iron teeth commands a young girl to perform the impossible task of sifting a mountain of wheat a grain at a time or be eaten. What the old witch doesn’t know is that the girl has her dead mother’s clothes pin doll in her pocket. Today we put so much faith in iPhones and wafer-thin laptops, but they have nothing on wooden dolls in fairy tales. In The Year of Being a Squirrel, Alys Torrance tells several stories, including ‘The Twelve Ravens’ and ‘Vasilisa,’ interspersed with nuggets from her own eccentric childhood. Unusually, the autobiography is used to illustrate the fairy tale instead of the other way round. The youngest of a large family, Torrance grew up in a house that would have felt at home in a story by E.Nesbit, C.S. Lewis or Lewis Carol. A shambolic warren of secret rooms and doors that were hidden, miniature, locked. Some led to brick walls. others to lost worlds, populated by all-powerful grandmothers and riven by wars between heroic red Undersquirrels and despotic grey Oversquirrels. Great British Eccentricity isn’t dead, it’s just making Fringe plays.

Torrance is a brilliant storyteller. Good enough to completely forget where she is in a story and have to consult the script but make it charming. She so totally inhabits a yarn-spinning state that this isn’t so much a performance, I suspect, but a normal conversation for her. She spins tapestries of words and images, but I did think it curious that the recurring moral in her tales is: Keep quiet and carry on. Women and children in her stories suffer endlessly and their only recourse is say nothing and do what they are told until opportunity eventually arises of either justice or escape. The Year of Being a Squirrel only needs some hot chocolate and a mat and I could have curled up on the floor afterwards and had a nap.

Camden Fringe Festival page

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