Robinson, Anna

Into the Woods takes us to imaginary wild woodland in the centre of London. In this story the woodsman, the wild girl and the widow Mary live in a recognisable present, but being archetypes, they continually try to emerge from our time into one that may never have been – the Lambeth woods. We too are drawn into our own fantasies of wild woods from folk tales, and here real-life images of Epping Forest and Box Hill fuel our imagination and work to plunge us, resisting, into the centre of the woods, into heterotopia. In the end though, we emerge back to the familiar, and the widow Mary snaps us back to reality when she purchases an acre of woodland from the Archbishop of Canterbury, signalling the end of the wild wood.