Adelaide Festival. Slingsby Theatre Company. The Wandering Hall of Possibility. 20 Feb 2026
“All trees are possible.” An incredibly foundational line from The Childhood of The World bound to echo throughout Slingsby Theatre’s richly ambitious triptych of works exploring 2,000 years of the world’s relationship with nature. A relationship explored through three writers reimagining of three very well-known fairy tales.
Jennifer Mills’ take on Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel is a dark and foreboding tale for the first triptych instalment. There’s a hint at a spirit of sparseness as the awaiting audience are offered strands of straw, asked to tie them together to create a long continuous strand. One person must be the keeper of the strands, placing them in the basket of the woman they find inside weaving (Elizabeth Hay).
It is a medieval 1300s like world, gripped by famine. Brother and sister Crann (Nathan O’Keefe) and Ré (Ren Williams) farm with their father yet are starving as all in the village are. When selected by lottery to become apprentices to the village, in ways unknown, their fears abound as to their future given the unknown fate of children gone before them, never to be seen again.
Mills’ writing is beautiful in its focus; tension, fear, frail hope against darkening despair, enveloping lost siblings in a forest of potential danger and hunger riven, her words are given to actors as story telling lines. The cast deliver them without attempting to impose themselves over the tale, but be in body and spirit frightened, searching, hopeful siblings they are. This has great impact, buoyed by Composer Quincy Grant’s score of madrigals, poetic dreamy strands of dulcet music played by the Horizon Orchestra.
Ailsa Patterson’s set and costumes are simple but effective in the circular hall. From the roof hangs dark webbed matting, through which Chris Petridis’s lighting transforms the stage into a place of nature. So steeped in the sense of a dark forest is the work, there’s a moment it literally comes to physical life.
The siblings escape from imprisonment is a moment in which they discover who each of them is as a person and where they are figuratively and personally.
This tension of fear, growth and understanding is so delicately managed by Director Andy Packer, Choreographer Lina Limosani, and supported spiritually by Composer Quincy Grant’s score. The appearance and disappearance of their late mother (Elizabeth Hay) in a dream sequence adds to sense of loss and search of safety, meaning.
Being discovered by a tribe of children who live safely and in plenty offers a conundrum. Stay or go? Return to father and hunger or stay in safety and abundance? There’s also the question of what this life challenge means. Because the children are bearing the brunt of those in the world wanting more than they need.
What do The Mother’s (leader of the children ensconced in a giant tree) words “all trees are possible” mean for the siblings? All children? The world?
This is a crucial question and challenge. Trees are things of nature. Having as many as possible is surely easy. But to qualify that by saying ‘are’ suggest that’s a choice that might not be taken.
David O’Brien
When 20 Feb to 15 Mar
Where: The Wandering Hall of Possibility
Bookings: my.adelaidefestival.com.au
