Founding artistic director of Long Cloud Youth Theatre Willem Wassenaar has dug around his own cultural roots to serve up two Dutch plays we are unlikely to see otherwise.

The first offering, Welcome to the Woods by acclaimed playwright/filmmaker Alex van Warmerdam (translated by Erwin Maas), launches housewives Fannie and Dora into the woods. They have – spontaneously, it seems, given they are totally unprepared – fled their suburban coops. And it turns out they don’t know each other, or themselves, very well.

As produced here, it’s hard to see the purpose of the play beyond its being a vehicle for a high-energy performance, lots of it very camp, most of it very loud. It’s all great fun and wonderfully surreal but that doesn’t mean the complexities of human psychology and emotional behaviour cannot be explored (consider Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories).

Rather than ‘be’ the characters in and of the woods, the director and cast choose to ‘do’ them. Rather than draw us into their weird woodland world, they display it, or some aspects of it, or manifestations of what the play has inspired them to do.

Ingrid Saker’s highly stressed – or is she excited – Fannie hits the ground running, demanding and commanding Johanna Cosgrove’s Dora, whose husband has blocked her credit card.
Both offer intelligent readings of their roles. Dora especially begins to intrigue when she expresses delight at hearing her husband is really angry, and fascinates when her relative equanimity at being trapped under a falling tree becomes a metaphor … but for what?.

Later we realise there is a whole new aspect to Fannie’s reason for abetting Dora’s leaving her husband but nothing about the way it’s set up or paid off delivers us the ‘OMG!’ moment it cries out for.

I am tempted to rationalise that this youth theatre company simply lacks the life experience to perceive the finer points of what these women are going through, or what the creatures and situations they encounter actually imply about their mental and emotional states. But that would be patronising. I have seen plenty of young performers explore the subtleties of human experience well beyond their years.

It seems all the other roles were written to be played by one male but here they are shared by six, which allows for some formation work, all clad in white with green ties, to the stirring tones of The Eurythmics, and some inventing of extra roles.

Luke Wilson’s fey Faun-cum-GP heading home from a parade is sardonically dramatic. Jonathan Price’s winged Elf prances nicely and dies balletically. The text seems to suggest the women feel these creatures are sexually predatory but it’s all way too gay for that.

Only when Dora’s husband Edward (Michael van Echten) turns up does testosterone enter the fray, albeit cloaked in vanity. Barney Tennyson, as Fannie’s son Jos, offers a wicked demonstration of how early in life boys can learn to manipulate and dominate their mothers.  

When the women get asked to help the dying King of the woods and claim they have their own problems, they’re told this is not a theme park, and they must abide by the rules of their adopted place. Such moments reinforce the idea the play has points to make. But quite what a naked man wanking to a picture book – of foliage was it? – has to do with anything, remains a mystery.

Designer Daniel Williams designates the forest with a green oblong bordered by a path and dotted with stumps and tangled vines. Nathan McKendry’s lighting is very dramatic when it needs to be.  

The many dynamic interactions and visual images that occur in the 75 mostly frantic minutes doubtless have meaning and should be intriguing. I suspect we could – and should? – identify with the passions and dilemmas of all the characters, human or otherwise, and wrestle constantly with questions of who is right or wrong, what is good or bad …

For all the play’s non-naturalism, it seems basic to me that we should leave with a strong sense of how what we’ve seen relates to the real world and to our own lives. But at the opening performance, I just couldn’t see the play for the Acting.
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