(posted 7089 days ago)Times
November 22, 2004Fairytales – the Grimm truth
Heather NeillChildren’s Christmas shows are reviving the darker edge of traditional stories
DANIEL CERQUEIRA is a strapping figure in jeans, sweatshirt — and a sweet pair of Cuban heels decorated with floppy roses. Roaring down the steeply raked circular practice set in the Young Vic’s Kennington rehearsal room, he is already both funny and frightening. But then, as a queenly Ogress with a taste for human flesh, he is meant to be. Cerqueira’s cannibalistic character is returning in Sleeping Beauty, Rufus Norris’s 2002 success, which this Christmas will be at the Barbican.
As much as anyone this season, that Ogress personifies the prevailing idea: fairytales are more to do with blood and guts than sweetness and light.
This isn’t a departure from the true nature of fairytales, argue writers and directors, rather a return to their essence before the Victorians diluted their power and Disney frosted them with sugar.
In Stratford Laurence Boswell is bringing back last year’s touching, funny and expertly choreographed Beauty and the Beast for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “In our version, quite a few of Beauty’s predecessors have been eaten,” he says cheerfully.
At the Watermill in Newbury Andy Brereton is directing Neil Duffield’s version of Arabian Nights and it is he who uses the word “trapped” to describe the effect of capturing oral tales in print. In these three cases the “trapping” took place in 17th or 18th-century France — most famously by Charles Perrault in his Contes de ma mère l’oye (Tales of Mother Goose) — but modern audiences may be surprised to find just how much of the earthiness, the sexuality and the cruelty were present in those early literary versions.
In a pre-Perrault variation of Sleeping Beauty, recounted by Marina Warner in From the Beast to the Blonde, the dozy heroine had two children by a married king without waking up. The king’s jealous wife later invited all three to court and proposed cooking the children in a pie for her husband to eat. Norris has combined the cook who saved their lives with the fairy who originally cursed the princess into the conscience-stricken fairy Goody. In Perrault’s retelling, the cruel queen has become the Ogress, Beauty’s mother-in-law, reinstated by Norris.
“Perrault is the most fun,” he says, “keeping the darkness, while shedding child-unfriendly aspects, but it has two distinct parts — before and after the long sleep — and a main character who doesn’t do anything.” Combining the two most active characters, the bad fairy and the cook, solves the structural problem and satisfyingly mixes good and evil in one character.
Norris is fascinated by the moral ambiguity of nature, represented here by a wild forest of speaking Thorns, while his wide-awake Beauty is an active heroine who helps to save her own children.
Sooner or later adapters of fairytales refer to the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim’s book The Uses of Enchantment. “Bettelheim said that Beauty and the Beast is about the awakening to adulthood through sexuality,” says Boswell. “It is about leaving home, about discovering yourself through facing something which is terrifying” — all of which could equally apply to Sleeping Beauty and Scheherazade in Arabian Nights, who saves her life by telling stories to keep the murderous Sultan’s interest after he has already dispatched 999 brides. According to Brereton, in an early version, “She ended up with three sons by the end of 1001 nights. It was quite saucy.”
Fairytales frequently include a problematic mother or mother-figure. Norris’s Ogress presents a threat to Beauty, but recognises her own dilemma: wanting to eat the thing she most loves. In Northampton Royal’s Hansel and Gretel, Phil Porter has conflated the children’s mother with the witch in the candy house in the Grimms’ tale. His witch ends up as biscuits and sweets given to the children, thus turning them into cannibals. More people-eating.
Bettelheim praised fairytales for making it clear that “a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable”. Hans Christian Andersen, whose bicentenary falls next year, drew on traditional themes, especially death and ageing, so wholeheartedly that he is often mentioned in the same breath as Perrault and Grimm.
Pam Gems’s version of The Little Mermaid for Sphinx Theatre will resume its tour next year, while The Little Fir Tree is the Christmas offering at the Crucible Studio in Sheffield. Both tales caution that if you get what you wish for you may regret it. The mermaid forgoes her nature to pursue a mortal who does not love her.
It is a bleak tale and Gems said she had to find “a fusion of ideas” in a post-Christian, post-Freudian world without “losing the strange Dane”. She has humanised the original and introduced some humour, but the darkness remains.
Andersen was a lonely man and the writer James Phillips regards the story of the little fir tree, which is cut down, festooned in baubles and then neglected and finally chopped up, as autobiographical, “an ugly duckling which didn’t turn into a swan”. He has introduced other characters, “new incidents and a bit of comedy, but you have to go into the darkness. Kids are up for it and for complexity of ideas; it’s parents who worry.”
In preliterate times fairytales must have reflected the circumstances of teller and audience, which probably included people of all ages. These latest stage versions are firmly in that tradition, reflecting a morally ambiguous age, but one which is also playful and in which women take a leading role.
Meekly wait for your prince? Not likely! You might just end up as someone’s snack.
WHERE TO ENJOY THE FULL HORROR
SLEEPING BEAUTY
Barbican (020-7638 8891)
Dec 11 Jan 11BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (0870 6091110)
Until Jan 16ARABIAN NIGHTS
Watermill, Newbury (01635 46044)
Dec 1-Jan 8HANSEL AND GRETEL
Royal, Northampton (01604 624811)
Dec 7-Jan 15THE LITTLE FIR TREE
Crucible Studio, Sheffield (0114 2496000)
Dec 9-Jan 8