The drama in the stories is always so delicate, hidden, but always there. In Grimm Tales, for instance, one actor simply donned earmuffs to become a hedgehog a milk-filled rubber glove stood in for a whole cow.įor her part, Still describes working on Duffy's texts as the equivalent of "renovating an old painting.
She does this through a beguiling mixture of storytelling, puppetry and music, characterised by a rough-and-ready aesthetic. "Melly can take the spine of a story and turn it into something that lives in the theatre," Duffy explains. With director Tim Supple, they went on to adapt further stories by Hans Christian Andersen and others: Beasts and Beauties – this time directed by Still – premiered in Bristol in 2004. That initial collaboration with Still resulted in two now-legendary 19 Young Vic productions – Grimm Tales and More Grimm Tales, both directed by Supple – which took audiences into the tangled woods of European folklore and demonstrated what happens when you stray from the path. But those of us who grow into adults are all ex-children." As we grow older, we lose the vividness that we experience as children. And there are many other ways that childhood is lost or stolen, too – through sexualisation, commercialisation, even just too many exams. It's a tiny minority, but they lodge in our minds. We all know the stories of disappeared children. I so relished that as a child."Ī story like The Pied Piper, with all its vanished children, offers a chance to come to terms with real-life grief, Duffy explains."The Moors murders, in which children appeared to vanish from the face of the earth, were part of my growing up." (She was born in Glasgow in 1955, and moved to Stafford aged six.) "And I remember that my daughter was very upset by what happened to those two little girls, Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells. They take you to the edge of terror and pull you back at the last minute. The stories have everything: fear, cruelty, bawdiness, good and bad parenting, magic, domestic violence and huge anxiety. And Grimms' Tales happens to be the one book she would take to her desert island: "It's one of the great monuments of childhood. Duffy was then 40 and pregnant with her daughter, Ella, so the invitation, she says, "came at a good moment". The partnership began nearly 20 years ago, when Still and another director, Tim Supple, invited Duffy to work on a production of Grimms' fairytales.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SUPPLE GAME SERIES
The adaptation is the latest in a series of collaborations between the poet laureate and director Melly Still. And a young boy who gradually becomes invisible when his mother remarries. A mother so eaten up with jealousy that she steals her daughter's shadow. These include: an outsider with mysterious powers who rids a town of vermin, and then entices all the children away. I wanted to be a poet."Įven so, her work forms the backbone of a new show opening in Manchester this week – a mixture of traditional and invented folk stories called Rats' Tales. "I did once write a play, but my heart was always elsewhere. 'I'm no playwright," says Carol Ann Duffy.
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