The Stage on The Fahrenheit Twins
There are simplistic shades of this production that echo the carefully crafted naivety of a play for infants. Yet there is something darker here that would give them nightmares.
Michael Faber’s story-telling is renowned for exploring uneasy areas and this adaptation gives his savage story an intriguing, if not wholly satisfying, new life on stage.
Lean on words and rich in visuals, the play - “suitable for ages 12-plus” - whisks us off to an incredible white world of the Arctic, with all the initial jauntiness of children’s theatre, as we see life through their eyes.
The combination of Naomi Wilkinson’s versatile snow set, Philip Gladwell’s lighting plot and the soundscape of Gareth Fry are key to anchoring the production with a powerful and sometimes chilling sense of place. You can sense the icy winds and remoteness of the land of the Fahrenheit Twins as they grow up, raised by their scientist parents and trying to ward off the approaching end of childhood. In this fairy tale turned sour, the twins’ carefree world of wonder shatters as their mother dies and their father encourages them on a precarious journey with little hope of survival.
Hayley Carmichael and Paul Hunter play the parents, the twins and snow foxes, oscillating between one and the other with a flick of their snow suits, masks and some dexterous stagecraft. The gouging of a snow fox’s eyes by the twins as a ritualistic offering to hold back time is at once brutal and poignant, while we share the excitement and danger of their helter-skelter husky ride to the edge of their tundra world and first sight of the sea.
Harsh, unwelcome lessons in the learning curve of life are gleaned as unstoppable time changes everything for the twins.
Roger Malone - The Stage, 7 October 2009