The youth performance ‘The Little Mermaid’ is not the fairy tale you know. But what is it? ★★ ☆☆☆

Her name is not Ariel but Annebel. And she’s not a mermaid, but a 14-year-old girl who is in the hospital, where she needs surgery on her leg. The youth performance The little Mermaid (8+) of Theater Utrecht is certainly not the fairy tale as you know it.

Director Thibaud Delpeut wanted something different. Anyone who knows him from his theater work for adults, often striking dissections of the human psyche, might expect something similar, but with songs? In recent years he has adapted texts by Lars Norén, Sarah Kane and Albert Camus. He thus combined an unerring insight into the dark side of man with a (come on, black) sense of humor.

But no, his youth theater debut has not turned out to be a realistic youth drama about guilt and sacrifice.

What is it then? Probably something in between. We will never know, because above all it has become a vain playground, in which you can see the makers fiddling around with all kinds of technical gadgets, gadgets and ideas (Highlights? Nah). We are thus deprived of any view of a coherent, or even intelligible story, concept or character.

It starts with the forced frame story. So Annebel (Annebel Overbeeke) has something wrong with her leg. Her father (Bram Gerrits), who once dropped boiling hot tea over it, wallows in self-pity. Her grandmother (Marie Louise Stheins) is a strange person. You could suspect an Ibsen-like family drama behind this, but nothing is done about it.

As soon as Annebel goes under anesthesia, she descends into an underwater dream world. She suddenly has sisters there. mermaids? No idea, they just have legs. There is also a vain prince walking around. Everyone talks like an unbelievable caricature of a teenager. The Prince: ‘I’m going to die here totally and everything. OMG! OMG!’ His chosen princess frolicates with a camera to capture the upcoming marriage proposal in overwrought YouTube videos. What all this has to do with Annebel, who is now suddenly called Ariel, remains unclear.

Somewhere she loses her voice (just like in the fairy tale). This is depicted with a sound effect that distorts her voice. It is a pity that even with ‘an unintelligible voice’ she can be understood better than ‘the Don’. The Don? Who was that again in the fairy tale? Good question. At some point I stopped asking these kinds of questions.

And then that technique. Most notable are the animations of two fish, Puffer and Cousteau. Their movements are controlled live by actors. Unfortunately, it proved impossible to animate their mouths. But then, as any ventriloquist knows, it’s the moving mouths that bring a doll to life. Now they remain flat images.

Ironic that The little Mermaid succumbs to unintelligibility and a lack of focus on the human aspect. Or, as the prince would say: OMG!