Feathers in the Snow

Description

Beneath a sky full of stars a decision is made. This decision sets off an astonishing chain of events. And a journey involving a talking leopard, a greedy King, a magical bird, a tidal wave, a Sea Witch, a lost soldier, a devious dolphin, a war - and a trail of feathers in the snow . . . Feathers in the Snow, a family show by acclaimed playwright and children's author Philip Ridley, is an epic story of magic and migration. Covering over five hundred years - and with a huge cast - it explores how stories give meaning to random events and of our constant need to find somewhere we call 'home'. Feathers in the Snow reunites director David Mercatali with playwright Philip Ridley, following their collaboration in 2011 on Tender Napalm which was named one of the Guardian, Observer and Time Out's best shows of 2011.

Philip Ridley is a contemporary artist, poet, novelist, film-maker and one of the country's most celebrated living playwrights. Ridley has been described as 'probably a genius' (Time Out) and 'the best British playwright of the last 20 years' (Aleks Sierz, author of In-Yer-Face Theatre). His plays include Ghost From A Perfect Place, Mercury Fur, The Fastest Clock in the Universe, and Vincent River.

Notable for its avid sense of fun ... the preoccupations are standard Ridley: stories ... and home, our constant yearning for each and the way we sometimes use the former to build the latter ... if you watch attentively you can spot substantive and complex ideas gliding past ... Ridley is stressing the "fun" in profundity. -- Ian Shuttleworth * Financial Times * Ridley's storytelling combines the fantastical and the down to earth, and leavens the darkness with humour ... like all Ridley's work, it's distinctively different, never patronising its young audience, and it celebrates the power of storytelling to see us through the darkest times. -- Lyn Gardner * Guardian * A further instance of Ridley's preoccupation with the power - for good and ill - of story-telling in our attempts to make sense of experience. What's new here, though, is the spirit of antic knockabout playfulness ... [a] resilience in Ridley's writing that offsets the harshness of the subject matter - its spring recurring rhythms and its larky knowingness about narrative tropes. -- Paul Taylor * Independent * The story has an epic structure ... gripping, confronting issues such as the unreliability of historians. Children around me seemed attentive, fascinated, serious -- Libby Purves * The Times *