Odyssey Theatre returns to Strathcona Park this August for its 39th season with a new play written by the company’s founding artistic director, Laurie Steven.
The Girl With No Hands was inspired by the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Girl Without Hands.” However, if you don’t know that tale, don’t worry. For Steven, the fairy tale was just a jumping off point to a complete reimagining in her own play.
This play is a truly magical evening in the park. It’s a tale of overcoming hardship through the power of love, dreams and hope. It is strengthened by fine acting, amazing masks, beautiful costumes, and some very scary looking puppets.
The play opens with the depressed handless girl attempting suicide. But she fails at that and a magical Sylph, or spirit, appears and encourages her to work to overcome her issues with the power of her dreams.
(L-R): Valerie Buhagiar, Lael Szabo, Bruce Spinney.
We then move to a play-within-a-play created by the Sylph called “The Handless Maiden.” The girl enters a magical wasteland where the first people she encounters are a kind of Greek chorus of three idiots — The Outcasts. These loony characters become her friends and provide a lot of the humour in the play. The Outcasts work in the dangerous (and environmentally unfriendly) Crozone mine and decide that the girl is magic and can solve their employment problems. After much pleading from them, she takes their case on and decides that she needs to see the King to get him to shut down the mines.
And so her quest begins. In very short order she meets the King, falls in love with the King, marries the King, and has the King’s baby. Meanwhile the King has gone off to war and the Queen Mother has attempted to collude with the First Minister (secretly The Devil!) to get back the royal power she has lost with this new marriage.
(L-R): Marlow Stainfield, Scott McCulloch, Erin Loretta Mackey, Chandel Gambles, Nicholas
Koy Santillo, Bruce Spinney.
The eight main actors are all extremely strong in this production. My favourites were Valerie Buhagier as the Queen Mother/Sylph and Nicholas Koy Santillo as the King. Buhagier dominated the stage in her scenes and I loved her voice. Santillo as the King perfectly played the indecisive monarch who can’t even stand up to his own mother. In many scenes his comic moves and timing added a lot to the play’s inherent humour.
Co-stars in this production are the design team that created the many costumes, masks and puppets. In a few cases, the masks blended seamlessly with the costumes to make a scene really come to life. At one point, a hapless security guard is attempting to deliver a letter to the Queen Mother. He is waylaid by The Devil in the guise of an inn-master and is tempted by three Strumpets. The Strumpets are scantily clad and wear pig masks as they try to get their hands on the letter the guard is carrying.
Erin Loretta Mackey.
The masks communicate the deficient characters of the Strumpets just as well as the costumes do. The Devil has a lot of great costumes, too. He is often disguised as someone else and then gets to strip off his outer costume to reveal his devil bodysuit underneath. At the end of the play he shows up in a white fur pimp coat, which seems quite appropriate.
For an enchanted night out, suspend your disbelief in the supernatural and join the Girl With No Hands as she harnesses the power of her dreams to overcome evil and fix herself.
The Girl With No Hands continues playing outdoors in Strathcona Park till Aug. 24. Shows are at 8pm from Tuesday to Sunday with a Pay-What-You-Can matinee on Sundays. Seating for the show is on bleachers or B.Y.O. lawn chairs near the stage. More information and tickets are available here.
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