Rumpelstiltskin by David Sawer

Recently on stage and getting its own post because it stands out from the holiday season of other fare: Rumpelstiltskin, CBSO Centre, Birmingham: The wordless reworking of a classic fairy tale makes its timeless message more alarming than ever reviewed by Anna Picard

In Rumpelstiltskin, Sawer's score is a rich broth of Petrushka-esque carnival music, Depression-era dance music and melancholy doynas, with 13 instruments providing the voices of the silent actors. It's a work that is hard to categorise, neither dance nor opera, but storytelling through music and movement.

With shades of Erich von Stroheim's silent film classic Greed in the lighting designs of Mimi Jordan Sherin, Richard Jones's tart, sharp production has Rumpelstiltskin (Sarah Fahie) as a tiny, gold-toothed vagabond. Crippled by debt and drink, the miller (Chris Harrison-Kerr) is hiding from two bailiffs whose pacing feet set the rhythm of the opening dance for double-bass, bassoon and tuba. Muted trumpet and horn announce the distraint of table, chair, even a cobweb, and, in one fantastical, desperate lie, the miller consigns his daughter (Bryony Perkins) to spin straw into gold for the king (Nicholas Lawson). Imprisoned in the wooden box that is Stewart Laing's set, Perkins weeps to a quartet of violin, viola, cello and harp (the players painted, like the actors, with the monochrome cosmetics of early cinema). Pale pizzicato figures cast a chilly spell as the box slides shut and Rumpelstiltskin sets to work, his fee the first-born child of the girl.