Theatre director’s magic wand turns Sleeping Beauty into a prince
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Version 0 of 2. It is the classic fairytale that has fired the imaginations of generations of young girls. But audiences at the Bristol Old Vic are about to see Sleeping Beauty as she has rarely been seen before. Theatre director Sally Cookson, feted for her stripped-down National Theatre version of Jane Eyre, has turned the princess into a prince named Percy. Children who expect to see a supine heroine in a sparkly dress, awakened by a kiss from Prince Charming, will be surprised at this most brazen of gender reversals. But Cookson is unrepentant. “I am sorry if there might be some children or, more likely, parents who think that is not how it is meant to be,” Cookson said. “But every time a fairytale is retold we cannot help adapting it in line with our own ideology, regardless of whether that is a conscious plan or not. In the Grimm version, for instance, the story finishes as Beauty wakes up, but a lot of the other versions have a difficult second part.” Cookson’s production of Sleeping Beauty is the latest production to tackle the portrayal of gender in popular entertainment. Gender-blind casting has gained wider acceptance, with Maxine Peake playing Hamlet in Manchester this summer and women taking the roles of soldiers and diplomats in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Henry V and in the recent staging of Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Trans actors are also finally being cast in television roles, and Cumberbatch and fellow actor Eddie Redmayne have both been called on to defend their decisions to portray transgender characters in the new films Zoolander 2 and The Danish Girl. For Cookson, retelling Sleeping Beauty was the perfect chance to undermine a formula that has even given its name to a damaging female mindset, the “sleeping beauty complex”. “Everyone thinks they know Sleeping Beauty,” said Cookson, “but we usually only get half the story. We might be familiar with versions by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, or even the one retold by the 20th-century Italian writer Italo Calvino, but there have been versions of it told for centuries and every time it gets slightly changed. At the Old Vic we are just appropriating it, as others have done. “I am very attracted to fairytales and I wanted a title people would recognise,” she said. “I was also drawn to a Welsh folk tale by Abram Woods called The Leaves that Hung but Never Grew. We took its heroine, Deylan, and made our sleeping figure a boy. When she finds him Deylan thinks he is unconscious and gives him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to revive him.” In Calvino’s version, said Cookson, the princess did not wake up with the prince’s kiss. “Instead he ends up impregnating her and she has twins! She only wakes up when the second child tries to suckle and ends up sucking out a poisoned thorn from her thumb instead.” This version, in which Beauty is “passive in every way”, also features a violent ogress mother-in-law who chases the princess. “Of course, we did not want to use this in a family Christmas show!” said Cookson. “What we wanted was a proactive, feisty heroine. Many of these earlier versions were recorded by men, so had heroines who were really so passive it is just not healthy. “Our fairytale heroine is able to save herself and other people along the way. Both the hero and the heroine in our story can be vulnerable and brave. We don’t pigeonhole them, although our prince, Percy, has been rather pampered and protected.” Powerful female characters retained from earlier versions include the wicked fairy and the gift-bestowing fairy godmothers, reimagined as a bunch of wise members of the Women’s Institute. Cookson does promise the warm glow of a traditional Christmas show, however: “I was brought up on panto. One of my most potent experiences at the age of five was seeing a show with a fairy godmother who had the most sparkly wand. I was convinced it was magic.” Her Sleeping Beauty might lack glitter but there would be an “inner sparkliness”, she said. The Bristol Old Vic’s artistic director, Tom Morris, invited Cookson to return to create a Christmas show following her critical success there with Jane Eyre last year and with bold adaptations of Treasure Island and Peter Pan. • Sleeping Beauty is at the Bristol Old Vic until 17 January |