“Snow Queen” –
a fairy tale for all ages
After
the Snow Queen kisses Kai, she
takes him to her kingdom, somewhere far north where everything is frozen.
There, Kai is getting bored and even if he hasn’t forgotten his grandma and his
girlfriend Gerda, he doesn’t love neither of them anymore. Was he heart-struck
by an ice shard which made him stone cold? After Kai doesn’t come back for
weeks, Gerda goes looking for him. She finds herself lost in a kingdom where
the King wants to send her to jail, but she gets lucky and is saved by a prince
and his princess. Then she is captured by a band of outlaws, and who know what
might have happened to her if she wouldn’t have been saved by the leader’s
daughter, who thinks of her as a friend. A clever reindeer finally takes Gerda
up North, where she finds a very much changed Kay, hidden in the Snow Queen’s
palace.
The Russian author Evgeny Schwartz rewrote
the famous fairytale, originally penned by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen,
sometime between the two world wars. While the original story did not have much
success during the 19th century, the stage adaptation was largely successful.
The reason for this might be that the play is far more prominent when it comes
to representing the contradiction between emotion and reason, wealth and poverty,
while being also a satire of the Stalinist era. Although in recent years, the
Snow Queen, Andersen’s version, has been adapted into film by Disney, we
believe that Schwartz’s take is more profound and is a fairy tale for all ages.
