Fallen Fruit

Fallen Fruit is the umbrella title Hadley V. Baxendale has bestowed on his theatrical adaptation of two landmark Victorian poems, an outwardly incongruous match-up of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade."

Rossetti's darkly erotic tale is of two virginal sisters, Laura and Lizzie, who emerge whole from the seduction of the more impulsive Laura by evil goblin men (all played by women) who ply her with juicy forbidden fruit - luscious melons, figs, grapes, cherries. These fruits are "like honey to the throat, but poison in the blood." Lizzie's sensual exorcism of the juices Laura has swallowed rescues Laura from the jaws of death. Perhaps that's the connection with Tennyson's famous Crimean War poem in which 600 gallant British soldiers ride into the valley of Death - cannon fodder to a man, their bodies fallen fruit.

Tennyson's lines are starkly proclaimed by uniformed actors as they march among battlefield props while the screen behind them shows huge tanks rumbling across unspecified terrain. After intermission comes a repeat of Rossetti's poem, this time in modern dress (Laura and Lizzie are in jeans). The forbidden fruit is now alcohol and drugs. Lizzie's roughing up in the previous presentation becomes a rape. Such heavy-handed obviousness is a real turn-off. Rossetti's mystical riddle of repressed female sexuality needs no glib updating.