Children to perform fairy tales that aren’t so grimm after rewrites

ENCORE Youth Theatre, the junior division of the Sinodun Players in Wallingford, is to put on a series of stories that were originally intended to be performed before the covid-19 pandemic.

The groups of Footlights (school years 3 to 5), Limelights (years 6 to 8) and Spotlights (years 8 to 10) will present A Forest Full of Fairy Tales: Remember the Rules of the Wood at the Corn Exchange tonight (Friday) and tomorrow.

Diana Christie, who leads the group, wrote the stories with a friend for a project in 2019 and then added some more.

She says: “We were in rehearsal from January 2020 and then in March we got the phone call that theatres were shutting. I had about 45 young people in rehearsals and they had done a lot of work and it would have been a shame to throw that in the bin, so we used them for online sessions and did sort of radio versions.

“I do a show with Encore every couple of years, so when the theatre asked me to do it in 2022, I couldn’t use those scripts because I still had the actors who had basically spent all of lockdown on them.

“Then when we were asked to do one for this year some of the original actors in these plays were off to university and everyone has moved up one or two classes.”

A Forest Full of Fairy Tales includes stories where Little Red Riding Hood fights off wolves, a frog prince tries to marry a princess, Snow White gets chased by an evil queen, four skilled sisters rescue a prince, Cinderella goes from rags to riches and Rapunzel hears all of these stories in secret. Diana says that the traditional stories have been updated to reflect modern life as fairy tales tend to be “very great stories for male actors and boring stories for female actors”.

“The Grimm’s fairy tale of The Four Skillful Brothers, we have called The Four Skilled Sisters,” she says.

“Also, when you’re presenting six of these stories at the same time, you realise they’re very similar, so we have changed them to make it a better experience for our cast.

“Cinderella’s quite funny actually and there are comical moments in most of them, but Rapunzel and Snow White are quite moody and atmospheric.

“I’ve got to keep in mind that the seven-year-olds may have a four-year-old sibling in the audience and this is a family show, so we can’t send them home with nightmares.

“Hopefully, as long as they present what they’ve done really well and come off confident then I’ll be happy.

“Things can and go wrong but that’s okay, we can deal with little mishaps. I just want them to feel confident and proud of themselves.”

• Encore Youth Theatre presents A Forest Full of Fairy Tales: Remember the Rules of the Woods at the Corn Exchange, Wallingford, tonight (Friday) at 7pm and tomorrow at 2pm and 7pm. Tickets cost £8 adults, £6 under-18s. The show has a running time of approximately 1 hour, 40 minutes including an interval. For more information and to buy tickets, call (01491) 852000, email info@
cornexchange.org.uk or visit www.cornexchange.org.uk/whats-on/
a-forest-full-of-fairy-tales