The forest looms large in the story of Hansel and Gretel, I find it one of the most intriguing ‘characters’ in the story.

Wild woods and forests have been the settings for so many stories; A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like it, Where the Wild Things are by Maurice Sendak, Mirkwood, The Old Forest and Lothlórien in The Lord of the Rings, The Blair Witch Project, and all the fairy tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, of course. Forests can take on whatever character we project onto them; they can be paradise, Eden, providers of food and shelter, or places full of shadows and nightmares. And they can be something in between; places to escape to, hide in, go off grid, places to find yourself, lose yourself and places to have visions.

In the stage adaptation of the story i’m currently working on, the forest reflects some of these different aspects, both light and dark. At the moment i’m playing with forest imagery to project onto the screen on the stage. Last week, when I was talking over ideas for the images with the director, Clive Hicks-Jenkins, he used an intriguing word – ‘hieratic’. This gave me a way in to the approach I would take. It was important these images added flavour and atmosphere but didn’t compete with the music or words or the    table top puppets of Hansel and Gretel (masterfully carved by Jan Zalud). So i’ve reduced the images down to simple shapes, formally arranged, in muted grisaille, like symbols of the forest, glyphs representing the woodland world; trees, plans, fungi, insects…