Classic fairytales re-imagined for modern-day readers

FAIRYTALES
A Concise Compendium of Wonder
Ceridwen Dovey, Ursula Dubosarsky, Jennifer Mills
Pink Shorts Press, $32.99

On the eve of the final day of 2099, a 12-year-old girl escapes her dystopian city. She dreams of a place where the “last of the baobab trees” still survive.

Meanwhile, at the tail end of the year 3099, in the trunk of “the last living tree on the Moon”, a12-year-old speaks. She praises the act of storytelling. For Earthkind, she says (“our long-ago ancestors”), despite calamity and the threat of apocalypse, storytelling offered something unquantifiably important: a world beyond utilitarian values.

So begins the opening story in this trio of classic fairytale adaptations. Produced by three Australian authors for Slingsby, a South Australian theatre company, Ceridwen Dovey’s offering reimagines Hans Christian Andersen’s 1846 story The Little Match Girl. Where Andersen evoked the ravages of industrialisation via his portrayal of a starving orphan, Dovey names the villainy of extractive industry more explicitly. Like roots in the sky, the tiny branches of Dovey’s endangered baobab tree suggest that perhaps the stories told on Earth were “back-to-front”. Forsaking the past, Dovey writes, means never knowing “if you are on the right or wrong path yourself”.

Children’s author Ursula Dubosarsky reimagines Oscar Wilde’s 1888 story The Selfish Giant as The Giant’s Garden. Dubosarsky’s giant dooms the futures of the children who once played upon the land he treats as his sole domain. One child, Ida, determined to fight back, makes a surprising discovery: upon meeting the giant, she feels pity. Frozen and helpless, he makes for a wretched and pitiable figure. It is Ida’s own pity, her love for nature, that sees the giant reverse track, undoing his damage.

In Wilde’s original, the selfish giant does not necessarily mean harm. He is confused by the desertion of spring; winter, as Wilde writes, “was merely the Spring asleep.” Dubosarsky’s version elides these suggestive qualities in favour of a more straightforward narrative. The giant is content in his selfishness, making it harder to understand why he would be moved by the return of Ida, a stand-in for childlike love and forgiveness.

The strongest of the three stories, Jennifer Mills’ The Childhood of the World reimagines the Grimm brothers’ 1857 classic Hansel and Gretel. Mills’ narrator, Ré, dreams of becoming a scholar. But her village is starving, divided and conquered. The “Master of the Hunt” and his entourage keep a registry of the local peasants they manage. In lieu of tithes, the town contributes its own children. The village leaders say these children are to be apprenticed to a trade; in reality, they are eaten. The children’s father, preaching the gospel of keeping your head down, warns Ré and her brother to stay out of the forest. Yet Ré recalls her mother’s encouragement: there are “No tithes in the forest.” Escaping there, Ré and her brother undergo a kind of loss of false consciousness as they become attuned to the forest’s rhythms “playing some shared music we can’t hear”.

Mills makes the materials she is adapting her own. Avoiding overly kitschy restylings and decorative primping, she reimagines the Grimm brothers’ tale as a warning about the destruction of the commons, capturing something of the layered and gothic atmosphere that made the original sing. If the rest of the collection often reads as occasional work, it is heartening to have a document of Slingsby’s productions released by Pink Shorts Press, an exciting new publisher whose previous titles include Olivia de Zilva’s excellent Plastic Budgie, as well as a number of reprintings of the Australian artist Barbara Hanrahan’s novels.

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