Reviews
Gresham is a truly great storyteller who unwraps each story like the petals of a lotus flower. At the end of the evening you leave with something beautiful created in your own mind. Her sparky energy conjures visionary delights like a storytelling genie who has just jumped from her bottle to open the doorway into your imagination.
Finally we were treated to some ancient Greek myths from Xanthe Gresham of the Crick Crack Club. The lights dimmed, our blankets warmed and an air of soporific contentment fell over the room. ‘It’s the feeling of being taken back to your childhood,’ explained the organizer David Carter (40winks.org) ‘rediscovering a time when you believed in flying carpets, ghosts and wonderful tales of romance…’
With a few props, exquisite timing, just enough movement, a few rhythmic repetitions and some audience participation, stories from various cultures were brought to life to beautiful effect.
A wonders-full collage of traditional tales and the circumstances of their telling….Xanthe Gresham gives a measured and sure performance, dressed in fire, speaking like a woman spitting jewels….
Extraordinarily entertaining. It seemed to me to be in the style of 1001 Nights in its rapid interweaving of wild stories. And it was a reminder too of Angela Carter’s breathless flights of fancy, as if we were trying to keep up!
Gresham sews everything together with passion, intensity, shards of humour and the economy of performance that marks out storytelling while vigorously exploring the themes of immigration, displacement, tyranny and the struggle for freedom.
Storytelling no longer a lost art…Xanthe Gresham took us into the unknown, not with a play or a one woman show but with a story, an ancient legend told with passion, audience participation and humour. This was a story for grown ups and she held the audience enthralled by a dark tale…..
The story-teller, Xanthe Graham, accompanied by Sherry Robinson, and with an array of props, head-dresses and sheepskins, relayed the bones of one of Shakespeare’s most beautiful plays, with a fine narrative lucidity and odd quotations.
“It is required that you awake your faith.” It was, and we did. It was one of the best instances of “immersive” theatre I’ve seen in ages.