OBSERVER: Fairytalers
Fairy tales have a very long history. Folk tales and fairy stories are not just made-up fantasies without connection to reality.
These stories often recall women’s lived experiences. The real-life inventors of these stories were themselves branded witches, imprisoned in towers, accused of treason, and the focus of scandals.
Long before the Brothers Grimm published their versions of fairy tales, the 17th-century writer Charles Perrault published a collection of stories, combining elements of earlier tales by Italian writers Giambattista Basile and Giovanni Straparola.
He also stole stories from a group of women, known as the Conteuses Précieuses.
These Precious Storytellers formed a glittering Parisian salon, challenging gender roles and entertaining aristocratic Parisians with captivating tales.
These women were once just as famous as the authors of fairy tales as Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, but history has forgotten them.
A girl locked in a tower who lets down her hair? A girl given a magic spinning wheel who needs to discover the name of a strange little man?
A girl who scandalised society wearing a rich red cloak? All the work of the women of the Conteuses Précieuses.
Writer/director Ellis Austin Finnie’s fun and informative play, Fairytalers, is less a history lesson, more a call to arms.
A talented quartet of performers, Daisy Valerio, Olivia Morrison, Janine Kwok and Emily Farrell, rescue the fairy-telling women from the depths of history with some fine performances all around.
Laughs, physical theatre, and wonderful shadow puppet play flesh out the narrative.
Fresh, funny, and full of girl boss vibes, Fairytalers is a perfect feminist fairy tale for the 21st century.
Review by Kathryn Keeble