Lewis Carrol’s epic “Hunting of the Snark” is classed as a “nonsense poem,” but the musical adaptation which has landed at the Sydney Opera House from London’s West End does its best to make sense of some charmingly odd characters and creatures.
A boy stands alone on stage asking his father to take him to school. His dad, a preoccupied banker says he’s too busy. They both, however, are fixated on the story of a “snark” spotting on Snark Island. Everyone previously thought the elusive snark was extinct. The father wants to find the snark to capture it and sell it, while the boy just wants a grand adventure. With money no object, the father hires a foremost snark expert, who has written a book on the subject, and comes with his own questionable homemade “snark detector,” a lot of enthusiasm, and a pet North American beaver, who happens to knit (I told you the characters were odd!). They set sail, with the Boy as a castaway, and eventually become stranded on Snark Island, along with a baker with amnesia and a bloodthirsty butcher, who will settle for nothing but snark for dinner.
Snark Island is a colourful place with brightly colored plants and green sand. The animals that live there are as strange as can be, which turns this snark hunt into a madcap adventure.
The play’s anachronistic style adds to the sense of everything being a little off-kilter. The costumes suggest Victorian, but the characters have mobile phones and scatter pop culture references liberally. It’s clear that the writing team has done their homework prior to arriving at the Opera House because they slip a number of Aussie references that work well for laughs (There were a few too many wink-wink to the adult jokes that fly over the kids’ heads for my taste, but that’s a quibble). The upbeat music, which makes up a big part of the show, is completely contemporary.
I found the momentum a little slow to get going, prior to their arrival on Snark Island, but from there it’s a high energy romp to the end. The cast is a delight, and the fun they seem to be having moving rapid fire between scenes transfers to the audience. The ensemble moves between wild characters, showing off a lot of comedic prowess in both over-the-top portrayals of the people on the journey and enthusiastic inventions of imaginary animals, all with their own personality quirks.
These animals, particularly the puppets, got the biggest vote of delight from my Miss 5. The knitting beaver charmed her to no end: “The beaver is so funny!,” she whispered to me three times during the show, and countless times on the way home. And, the giant Jubjub bird, who seems to be made primarily out of plastic grass skirts, and has little patience for the foolhardy people, earns some of the biggest laughs of the show.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned on Snark Island, and it takes a number of days of snark hunting to uncover truths about waiting for things worth having, how little money actually matters, and what it means to possess a thing that’s not rightfully yours. Perhaps the most important lesson is that if you want to catch something silly, you have to do silly things. There is no shortage of silliness in this adventure, and we find that by letting ourselves laugh, we all come to the end better off. Hunting of the Snark is school holidays fun with laughter and music in its heart.
We attended Hunting of the Snark as guests of the Sydney Opera House. Opinions are entirely ours.
Hunting of the Snark runs through 22 July, and is recommended for children ages 6+.