Despite its happy outcome for the heroine and her mother, this folk tale from Norway illustrates the harsh realities of life in rural communities where long winters always brought with them the threat of severe deprivation and even famine. The North Wind brought icy blasts that threatened life, but in this tale, that often malign force is transformed into an agency for good. Kari, (played by Vineeta Rishi) the heroine of the tale, has her precious flour blown away by the North Wind leaving the girl and her mother facing the winter with only gruel to help them survive. But Kari is spirited, she sets off over the mountains to confront the North Wind and seek retribution.
On the stage at the Bristol Old Vic, her journey over the mountains to the home of the North Wind is symbolically re-enacted by Vineeta and other actors in a simple but effective piece of physical theatre. Imagination, physical skill, and
evocative music make the sequence completely believable. The contrite North Wind offers Kari magical gifts as compensation, but the first two (a magic table cloth and a goat that excretes gold) are stolen from Kari when she
visits an inn presided over by a Troll Hag (played by Howard Coggins). Director Melly Still used members of the company to play
non-speaking roles as guests at the Inn. This gave the story greater depth by adding a social and a humorous context. When, for example, in her
first visit to the inn Kari demonstrated the magic food-producing cloth, the look of astonishment on the faces of the hungry-looking actors (there was no actual food at all) was enough to convince the audience that food was really there and that such an abundance of it in this barren place was a true miracle. On Kari’s return to the inn with her second gift (the wealth-producing goat), she and the audience see immediately that the availability of unlimited and on-demand food has made the people who stole it grow grotesquely fat, just as their subsequent material enrichment from the stolen gold is displayed through the use of properties like ghetto blasters, chunky gold jewellery and cigars, making them appear foolish and vulgar.
