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Playbox Theatre
The Dream Factory
Stratford Road
Warwick CV34 6LE
United Kingdom​

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Home | The Snow Queen 2018

“Not all stories are gentle stories. Some cut deeply, hurt us when we hear them. For us, some stories are just too real, tell us of pains we’ve felt, or those to come; our fears, our cruelty, of how time is chasing us. Chasing us in and out of shadows we shall never escape…”

The Company

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Hans Andersen/Sorcerer: Jamie Whitelaw
Young Gerda: Freya Travis
Grown Up Gerda: Olivia Hass
Young Kay: Ethan Phillips
Grown Up Kay: Rob Redwood
Snow Queen: Eilidh Evans
Grandmother: Jessica Chapple
Sorceress: Paige Cooper
Raven: Kate Jones
Princess: Amberqway Alford
Prince: Oscar Webster
Old Crone: Danni Burridge
Young Robber Girl: Ottilie Lampitt
Grown Up Robber Girl: Amelie Ashley-Timms
Reindeer: Elysia Sully
Doe: Daisy Powell
Finn Woman: Kitty Duffy

THE JOURNEY ENSEMBLE

Taya Ashley-Timms, Harry Bailey, Georgia Blackie, Tasha Chapple, Celine Delahaye, Ella Hampson, Lilly Lister, Leah Moss, Daisy Parr, Connor Parris, Freya Phillips, Emma Rees, Laura Smith, Mery Sutherland, Max Thompson, Hannah Wiltshire

SNOW FLAKES

Sam Almond, Viola Davies, Esme Fleeman, Gabriel Gaiser, Annalise Milburn, Martha Wainwright

ICICLES

Lauren Heaps, Ida Ledwitch-Madsen,
Hugh Markham, Endelyon Mitchell,
Matilda Stephenson, Daniel Travis

SKATING TROUPE

Sophie Alder, Mary Allen, Sophie Anderson, Ed Butler, Jessica Chapple, Yannic Fowler, Chloe Hurst, Amelia Travis, Zoe Wallis

Creative Team

Director & Choreographer: Emily Quash
Written by: Toby Quash
Design: Commedia
Lighting Design: Matt Cater
Sound Design: Richard Cooper

Production Team

Technical Director: Richard Cooper
Scenic Art Director: Chris Johns
Puppetry & Scenic Art Support: Katy Tunstall
Scenic Art Support: Laura Smith & Cate Johannessen
Ice Bird costumes & Props Manager: Heather Riley
Assistant Directors: Calum Blackie, Teagan Gough, Molly Perkins
Lighting Operator: Seth Blackburn
Crew: Jacob White
Head of Welfare: Elaine Ball
Head Chaperones: Jane Hass, Alison Phillips, Iain Chapple & Alice Laker
Production Photographer: Liam Bessell

Public Services Department

Front of House Manager: Florence Ellis
Membership & CRT Manager: Charlotte Gough
Customer Relations: Rhys Bevan
Café Manager: Karen Hulme

Production dates

Original run: 22nd-31st December 2018

Our 2018 revival of The Snow Queen was an ambitious, exciting and physical production, which played in traverse creating a spectacular runway for Gerda’s journey through the seasons, and her brave quest of self-discovery to save her best friend, Kay, who has been taken far North by the hypnotic Snow Queen, where his heart has been turned to ice.

The Playbox ‘Ice Troupe’ trained hard over 4 months to become highly skilled in rollerblading, enabling a haunting entourage of beautiful demons to glide through the action, both pursuing, and enticing, our heroine as she fulfils her destiny. This was another Christmas-Spectacular for Playbox Theatre and closed out 2018 with beautiful design and fabulous soundtrack, in an adaptation for the stage by Toby Quash.

What the press say…

This take on Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairytale has been rendered pretty scary by Toby Quash’s rewrite and marvellously alive by Emily Quash’s crisp direction. Rumour has it that the team were set on producing the show on actual ice until the rink proved too tricky and expensive. So we get our skaters on rollerblades whizzing within a whisker of us sat in the round in a fantastically balletic and perilous choreography. Led gracefully by Ed Butler as if he were commanding s display of the Red Arrows, the skating alone would make a visit worthwhile.

Visually splendid and dramatically lit, one of the show’s major virtues is the way that well-known and time-worn characters have been released from their over-telling and brought back to life. Freya Travis appears the most darling Gerda but she can be snappy and bossy and bolshy as any pre-teen; an extraordinarily accomplished performance for one so young. Ethan Phillips is her Kai, full of verve and shouty bravado one minute, a mute zombie the next.

And presiding over all, there’s Eilidh Evans’ Snow Queen, motivelessly evil and elegantly regal, a beautifully psychotic mesmeric force cruelly driven by an untold, internalised agenda. Tiny ones in the audience cowered; the rest of us too as she forced her captives to gaze horrified into a mirror, their reflections as warped and damaged as the cruellest taunts they might fear from social media.

Stratford Herald 11th January 2019