REVIEW BY JESSICA FANWONG
EDITED BY OLIVIA DI GRAZIA
We think we know the bedtime stories we were fed as kids – but do we really understand them?
That is the question Ranting Mime Productions asks in their bold and stirring new work Brothers Bare, presented as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. Written by Jessica Fallico and Iley Jones and directed by Fallico, Brothers Bare takes familiar dark fairytales a notch further, confronting the dangerous expectations these seemingly innocuous tales drilled into us as kids.
Fallico and Jones’ script is highly poetic, laden with vivid imagery and beautiful metaphors –thematically fitting and shaped like a nursery rhyme. However, the language is where the beauty ends: every other element of the show is wrapped in a sinister tone that verges on horror.
Stepping into Brothers Bare does not transport you to a magical fairytale world of pumpkin coaches and glass slippers. Instead, the backstreet industrial studio that is the Explosives Factory has been transformed into a brooding concrete jungle. The only remnants of childhood are small images graffitied onto rough blocks, masterfully repurposed as versatile set pieces throughout the show. While the set is bare and stripped down, it very aptly grounds the audience in the coldness of urban modernity.
The show centres on three narrative threads, with references to a plethora more smoothly weaved into the storytelling fabric.
The first story draws on Cinderella to comment on the bleakness of “happily ever afters” and the dangerous idolisation of marriage in fairytales. A young girl (Grace Gemmell), dressed in an elaborate ballgown, gets an Enchanted-style reality check while stuck on a ladder. She has a comical exchange with the White Rabbit (Charlie Veitch) from Alice in Wonderland before chopping off her own foot in pursuit of her “happy ending”.
The second story reimagines the queen from Snow White to explore beauty standards and our toxic obsession with validation, recontextualised in the contemporary world of a 21st century lifestyle influencer (Gemmell). The apple becomes a phone and the haunting mirror becomes a ring light while two trolls (Dion Zapantis and Veitch) torment the woman with fears of fading youth and beauty.
The final tale is the grimmest of the three. Drawing on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the show offers a stark look at the dangers facing a young homeless girl (Gemmell) who enters the house of three violent men (Veitch, Zapantis, and Elisheva Biernoff-Giles).
The show is brought to life by a versatile cast who seamlessly switch between multiple roles. Gemmell paints three impassioned portraits of female vulnerability – the damsel in distress, the fading rose, and the victim of assault – in a world smothered by misogyny and patriarchy. Gemmell’s ability to morph across three distinct yet interconnected characters is truly impressive.
Veitch transforms powerfully from the comic, witty dandy of the White Rabbit, complete with a posh British accent, to the cunningly intimidating Bear brother. Whether rabbit, troll or bear, his trickster energy is retained, and he commands the stage at every moment. Meanwhile, Dion Zapantis plays the violent brother with a menace that pierces the air like knives.
These three stories are threaded together by the narrator (Biernoff-Giles), who guides the show and offers moralistic commentary in highly poetic language throughout. Biernoff-Giles serves as the emotional anchor of the show, directing audience attention and prompting us to re-examine our unquestioned biases. For the most part, the narrator does not participate directly in the stories, instead creating chalk doodles on the ground or observing from a distance. The narrator’s entrance into the third story sees them morph into one of the cold abrasive brothers, a strong directorial choice that highlights the complicity of the non-intervening narrator.
The lighting design by Viv Hargreaves is captivating, emphasising the harsh grimness of the digital-age urban world. A particular highlight is the shadow work in the second story, which reduced the influencer to doll-sized proportions, snatched and trapped in the enormous hands of the trolls. This effect is further enhanced by the flickering ring light and immersive soundscape (Raphael Bradbury), which captures the influencer’s spiral and sense of suffocation.
In general, I felt that technology could have been used more effectively to strengthen the link to the contemporary setting. The second story in particular could have strengthened its thematic ties to the digital age by utilising projections. Projections might also have helped with the visibility of Biernoff-Giles’ chalk doodles, which, while delightfully littered with contextualising motifs from fairytales, were unfortunately difficult to see for audience members not sitting in the front row. Alternatively, presenting the chalk drawings as vertical wall art rather than on the floor could have made them more visible while also tapping into the subversiveness of street art.
Storytelling, though, is the show’s greatest strength. Fallico and Jones skillfully select familiar moments in fairytales and link them to contemporary culture, highlighting how hauntingly relevant these macabre brutalities remain. We may have previously glossed over Cinderella’s stepsisters’ willingness to chop off their feet to marry the prince, but here we are confronted by the horrors of the sacrifice. Similarly, the atmosphere of suffocation in the Snow White sequence holds up a mirror to our complicity in creating the evil queen: in fairytales and in real life, we are quick to punish aging women and to pit women against each other.
However, there were moments where the emotional weight across the three sequences felt uneven. Despite being structured as a triptych, the third story felt decidedly heavier – both thematically and in pacing. The emotional climax of the show is a hauntingly beautiful dance sequence (choreographed by Cameron Boxall) that symbolises the sexual assault of the homeless girl. Boxall’s choreography is so powerfully expressive that further elaboration was unnecessary and, if anything, reduces the impact. The subsequent depiction of rape came across unnecessarily violent, contributing little to the narrative and detracting from the horrors of the dance sequence. Ending the story with the choreographed sequence would have tightened the pacing and prompted reflection in the audience long after the show ended.
The concept of the show is certainly fascinating. In an age saturated with Disney remakes and reclaimed fairytales, it is very interesting to take a step back and ask: what are fairytales? What purposes do they serve and how have the stories we were raised on shaped our understanding of the world? Brothers Bare is a harrowing tale that slaps us with a dark reality. As artfully expressed by Biernoff-Giles: “living the fairytale shouldn’t be the mission… fireworks fizzle, butterflies fly.” Here, fairytale magic collides with the cold concrete walls of reality.
Ranting Mime Productions’ Brothers Bare played October 7th – 11th at Theatre Works Explosives Factory as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
JESSICA FANWONG (she/her) is a Naarm/Melbourne based writer, theatremaker and creative arts enthusiast currently studying Masters in Arts and Cultural Management. Her work can be found on Farrago and the independent theatre scene.
OLIVIA DI GRAZIA (she/her) is a passionate director, writer and performer in her third year at the University of Melbourne. She is a sub-editor for The Dialog, and is developing a disability initiative for Union House Theatre to ensure student theatre is accessible to everyone.
The Dialog is supported by Union House Theatre.
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