The highly acclaimed Pan Pan Theatre who wowed New Yorkers with The Crumb Trail earlier this year, and Oedipus Loves You in PS122 in 2008, will bring The Crumb Trail to the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival in 2009.
Ireland’s Pan Pan has been charming the timid and frightening the confident across Europe and North America for some years now. With recent forays into China with their much – travelled ‘Oedipus Loves You’ and a Beijing skew on that Irish theatre potato, ‘The Playboy of The Western World’, this is a company that is of Ireland but creates its theatre far from the hearth and the apron string.
The Crumb Trail is all about the illumination that comes from groping in the dark. It portrays long-cherished popular fictions undergoing sea changes amid contemporary storms: the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Hansel and Gretel.
Fears that have always haunted children — being abandoned by parents, being stranded in unknown territory with no way home — are given contemporary form in unreliable (and in some cases predatory) grown-ups and savvy but scared kids.
But there’s a new, frightening kind of forest in the world of “The Crumb Trail,” ready to consume humans of all ages, and it’s made up of the displacing, technologically rendered images of self that frame, shrink, warp, expand and disguise identity.
