The Veiled Ones: Not all witches are bad

THE VEILED ONES

Samuel Beckett Theatre
Dublin Fringe Festival
★★★★☆
By merely taking inspiration from Roald Dahl's The Witches, this dance can happily ignore straitjacketing narrative. Instead it concentrates on Dahl's depiction of the special relationship between grandparent and grandchild, and how not all witches are evil.

Junk Ensemble regularly create works of liminal greyness, but The Veiled One presents black-and-white opposites, so the audience must seek that grey area as it is surrounded by four contrasting settings: a grandmother’s homely cabin is set opposite a nightmarish witches’ den, and a Day-Glo sweetshop on the other side of an elemental natural oasis of hope, where tiny plants are precariously planted in sand.

Evil witches, we are shown, are created by our own imagination: projections of personal fears and historical prejudice.

Excellently produced and performed, The Veiled Ones encourages its viewers, whether young or old, both to face down their fears and to look beyond stereotypes.

Runs at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College Dublin, until today, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival