The Butcher's Daughter at the Herald Theatre

By BERNADETTE RAE

It is set in a town at the top of the world, and Pandemonium Theatre is promising its new production, The Butcher's Daughter, will make audiences feel on top of the world, too.

A sneak preview of a rehearsal revealed a gorgeously quirky mountain taking shape and a folkloric tale to match unravelling around its base, in a flurry of tumbling bodies, songs and spells, nightmares, an incubus, and much hilarity amid the drama.

In that lofty town of mayhem and madness, the butcher keeps the soul of his dead wife imprisoned in a special box. His daughter is a "liberalma"- a made-up name, like much else that is created in this play, for a person who releases souls, including those of slaughtered animals, which makes their meat especially delicious.

She knows nothing of her father's secret, but longs to escape. Enter the Travellers ...

The Butcher's Daughter is inspired and played by Kate Parker, of Moa Hunting fame. Parker was also praised for her performance as Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare's Shorts, and for the unforgettable little duck puppet in The Candlestickmaker.

Her new work promises the same talent and charm on a larger scale and is directed by her Moa Hunting acting partner, Julie Nolan. The pair are graduates of the John Bolton Drama School in Melbourne, where physical theatre is the name of the game.

"Most theatre begins with a story and the theatrical bit is added. We start with theatre and then make up the story," says Nolan.

The Butcher's Daughter evolved from Parker's fascination with angels and gypsies, and began life as a 30-minute showcase piece she performed last year with Unitec-trained actor (and Macbeth in Shakespeare's Shorts) Phil Brown.

"There was no story, just characters and theatrical events involving gypsies and the capture of a spirit creature," she says of that first outing. "At the end everyone went, 'Yay! Amazing!"'

So Parker applied for Creative New Zealand funding to develop it into something bigger, added a third actor, Paolo Rotondo, and workshopped it under the direction of John Bolton.

During its long evolutionary process "it all got a bit too literal and our magic went out the window", says Parker. "We tried to set it in New Zealand. But there are no gypsies in New Zealand. So they became shearers, then goldminers. It just got a bit bogged down.

"I really wanted to stay in the folklore world. So we have left all that literal stuff behind.

"Then John Bolton got a new job, as head of acting at the Victoria College of Arts. So the director's job went to Julie. "

In the 18 months of the show's gestation, before the brief five-week rehearsal began in earnest, Parker was "supported and given good feedback by several theatre practitioners", who she respects.

"Sometimes they expressed doubts, or questioned our direction. It is all a bit scary but we have kept to our own path. This process is about discovering our own style, own methods and our own production.

"It is fantastical, the most eccentric love, and deeply rooted in real emotion," says Nolan.

"It is all about love and betrayal and loss, of almost melodramatic proportion. But ultimately it is about liberation and the magic of the heart and the soul. And we want it to look effortlessly unrehearsed. But in fact it is carefully choreographed and very technical."

During its 90 minutes The Butcher's Daughter employs rope work, acrobatics, shadow puppets, storytelling and singing - in a language that has been mistaken for Russian but is Kate Parker-designed gobbledegook.

And vegetarians need not fear. Though meat does feature significantly, the only real flesh on stage will be a string of innocuous cheerios. The rest is of the magical, mythical and purely imaginative kind.

* When: Tomorrow until May 14