The Snow Queen review: A compassionate fairy tale heating up the cold-hearted

BrokenCrow's audio play adaptation delivers Hans Christian Andersen's bright-coloured characters while staying devoted to a sweet but shaken childhood friendship. Photo of Deirdre Dwyer by Enrique Carnicero

The Everyman, Cork & Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford

★ ★ ★ ★ 

Things are done with mirrors in The Snow Queen, BrokenCrow’s audio play adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s wild fairy tale. High in a mountain, a mysterious woman keeps an all-magical looking glass that only holds gloomy reflections, distorting all positives into negatives. It will show your attractive fireside cabin as a bleak dilapidated shack. More depressingly, it transforms an enthusiastic kid into a mean grouch. 

“You know when you see your best friend whispering with someone else, and you think maybe they’re whispering about you?” asks Gráinne, a girl watching her schoolmate grow distant. The hurt voice of young Mia Clifford weaves this sweet portrayal of a childhood friendship shaken and left delicately fragile. Since falling from a tree, Fionn Butler’s Caoimhín moodily evades questions about his health (“What is this, Twenty Questions?” he says) as if, in Deirdre Dwyer’s sensitive script, this were a compassionate enquiry into a good-natured boy’s worrying unhappiness. 

Of course, a fragment of the Snow Queen’s mirror has gotten under Caoimhín’s skin, and when he vanishes Dwyer’s production adopts the brisk pace of an adventure story. Gráinne’s search for her friend becomes encouraged by the folky guitar of Anthony O’Dwyer’s music, while a dynamic cast (Aideen Wylde, Jacqui Kelleher and Nicholas Kavanagh) voice bright-coloured characters met along the way, from a deceiving sorceress to a hell-raising young thief. 

Released as an eight-part series, the play ingeniously keeps its audience on Gráinne’s trail by posting out sealed messages, one to be opened for each episode. Whether a report about a missing boat or a payoff for a stolen carriage, the dispatches - embellished by a team of excellent illustrators - extend the rich world of Dwyer’s play. The sulphur of Andersen’s Denmark gets replaced by a magical, Irish rural world with no iPhones but where there are reindeer. 

There are a few zingy contemporary touches to admire. Listen close and you'll hear Gráinne wash her hands when arriving inside someone’s house. The possessive sorceress is actually an old woman feeling the loneliness of isolation. There are talking flowers being magically kept alive out of season. 

The structure of Andersen’s fairy tale is such that each chapter is built loudly around eye-catching characters passing through. Impressively, Dwyer's play delivers that spectacle while staying devoted to the story's central relationship. At the end of the last episode I listened to, Gráinne stepped out into the blizzard looking for Caoimhín. “It is the power of her warm heart and clever head that has gotten her this far,” says a passer-by. Loyalty is a good, reversing mirror image for detachment, and it might heat up the cold-hearted.

Runs until 18th December.