The season of the witch

Catherine Foley drops in on rehearsals for Hansel and Gretel

It is  very dark in the theatre - even a bit spooky. Backstage, there are sounds of hammering and lifting. This is the set where Hansel and Gretel will be abandoned by their parents. This is where the wicked witch will fatten them up to eat them. There's her cage hidden under the table.

Then, in the dim light, behind the shadows, the gingerbread house comes into focus. It's covered in giant smarties, liquorice allsorts and chocolate. Is it real? Of course, says director Bairbre Ní Chaoimh, with a wicked grin. No, really. Can you eat it? Yes, of course, she says, without the flicker of a smile.

Fergal McElherron and Judith Roddy, who play Hansel and Gretel, jump into the little bed on stage. Their woodcutter father, played by Barry Barnes, takes the lantern and walks across to his demented wife, played by Bríd Ní Neachtain. "The woodcutter's wife boiled up the bones of the old goat and picked them bare," she says, and so the story of Hansel and Gretel unfolds.

"You never can tell what people can do when they're demented by hunger," intones Ní Neachtain, who plays the children's mother and later the witch. Won't this dual-role playing be confusing for the children in the audience? Yes, she says, smacking her lips with glee. That's the whole point, she says.

"When the Brothers Grimm published it first, it was the mother and father who decided to abandon the children," says Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy, adaptor of the fairytale and artistic director of Storytellers Theatre Company. "The mother was watered down to the step-mother 50 years later because the first version was too awful to contemplate. That was the beginning of the prettification, or Walt Disneyfication, of the story."

"It's about children learning to separate from their parents and gaining their independence. Sometimes children perceive that as abandonment and the mother can truly turn into a witch. My own interpretation is that it's a cautionary tale - never to underestimate or take for granted the treasure of children's love . . . It's a scary story but children are better able to deal with those scary elements than adults."

At the begining of the 19th century, the Brothers Grimm were interested in preserving the oral tradition of "a fairly peasant culture in remote districts" in Germany. "There was a high level of illiteracy. They anticipated that that oral tradition was going to be lost," she says. "It was freeing to think about the psychological implications and the archetypes that are in there but when you see it on the stage, and you see the parents plotting how to get rid of the children, it's even more arresting."

Night has fallen and Hansel and Gretel fall asleep in their bed. In a dream-like sequence, they enter the forest. Dwarfed by the huge trees, they appear tiny, because they are played by puppets.

"I would never have thought of the elements of puppetry but Bairbre was interested in playing with scale," says Burke-Kennedy. "You get quite a complete different perspective on those lines when puppets come in." The story is about "children's capacity for love and forgiveness. It's wonderfully redemptive," says Burke-Kennedy. "That's an adult's way of looking at it. But for children, there's triumph in the way they outwit the witch."

"The brilliant thing about a fairytale," says Ní Chaoimh, "is that it acknowledges that kids have those subliminal fears. This puts the children in a dangerous situation and they manage to extricate themselves."

Storytellers' Hansel and Gretel is at Project, Temple Bar, Dublin 2, until January 4th