My burning question had to be answered. What was this traditionally-based book doing among the theatrical offerings of the 2004 Oxford Greek Festival? I gamely went along to find out.

My idea of children's theatre is that characters from another time or place should be brought to life for the children using text, characterisation and set. The set in this production was simple, the text was freely adadapted by Aria Sandis and the characters were enough to start a debate about the roles of traditional fairy tale characters. Throughout the first act, the audience warmed to the Italian mama wolf who was trying to protect her wolf babies. The entrance of the "Big Bad (macho) Pig" was most enjoyable, particularly as she was adorned with a gold medallion. She huffed and puffed her way through a succession of houses before her conversion to good pig. I hope the wolves will continue to develop their characters as the play runs, as they need to be more clearly individual (though this must be hard to do with so much choral speaking). Amongst the characters, I particularly enjoyed the roles of Rachel Ford Pritchard, who came on in a variety of disguises - but to be fair, my favourite was the marshmallow-munching macho pig. She provided an evening of entertainment, brought to life characters from the page and recycled the Village People's music with the help of some talented filking*. An enjoyable evening.

Karen Fletcher, 12.05.04

*Probably related to filching, (!) filking is an offshoot of folksinging which has grown particularly rapidly in the science fiction community. Songs can be about fictional characters, computers, space, etc, or can be parodies à la "Weird Al" Yankovic. Filk covers a lot of territory. Many people now are writing original songs with original music which can be described as filk, so the genre has"matured" from the days when 'filk' consisted of songs with new words fitted to well-known melodies, and 'to filk' meant to write those lyrics. (Taken from Filking with Julia)