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<\/p>\nWhen Ceridwen Dovey was 12, she played the lead role in her school’s production of The Little Mermaid.<\/p>\n
“Somewhat controversially, my school decided to put on the original adaptation of The Little Mermaid \u2014 not the Disney version where she has a happy ending,” says Dovey, an award-winning author and science writer.<\/p>\n
In Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairy tale, The Little Mermaid \u2014 spoiler alert \u2014 dies at the end, and her spirit ascends to heaven.<\/p>\n
Dovey recalls at the play’s end walking up a set of stairs surrounded by clouds of dry ice.<\/p>\n
“I could see all the kids in the audience sitting cross-legged on the floor and sobbing, tears pouring silently down all these children’s faces,” she recalls.<\/p>\n
“There was so much emotion in the room, and it was cathartic, it was like an outpouring \u2026 of grief.”<\/p>\n
When Andy Packer, CEO and artistic director of Slingsby Theatre Company, asked Dovey to write a story based on another Andersen fairy tale, The Little Match Girl, it was to this memory she turned.<\/p>\n
“I was really interested in channelling a 12-year-old’s thoughts and feelings because that was my first embodied experience of what his writing was about,” she says.<\/p>\n
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Slingsby’s technical director Darian Tregenza built a bespoke electric candle for the show. (Supplied: Eyefood)<\/p>\n
In Andersen’s original 1845 story, the little match girl spends a freezing night on the street, too scared to go home to her cruel father.<\/p>\n
To warm herself, she lights her matches one by one and is comforted by the visions she sees in the flames, including one of her late grandmother. When she freezes to death at the end of the story, she has a smile on her face, happy to meet her grandmother in heaven.<\/p>\n
As The Little Match Girl shows, Andersen’s fairy tales were often very sad, Dovey says, unlike the sanitised Disney adaptations that have become so popular in the 150 years since the writer’s death.<\/p>\n
“He is OK with themes of death and mortality but a lot of that gets scrubbed out in other versions of his work,” she says.<\/p>\n
Dovey’s reworking of the fairy tale is the basis for The Tree of Light, one of a triptych of adapted works known as A Concise Compendium of Wonder that Slingsby will perform at the 2026 Adelaide Festival.<\/p>\n
A poignant swansong<\/p>\n
Packer invited Dovey and two other writers, Jennifer Mills and Ursula Dubosarsky, to reimagine three classic fairy tales \u2014 the Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel, Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant and The Little Match Girl \u2014 for a contemporary audience.<\/p>\n
He says each of the three original texts share a common theme: humanity’s relationship with nature, tapping into Slingsby’s interest in the environment and anxiety over “our dissociation from the natural world as humans over a long period of time”.<\/p>\n
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The three adapted stories by Ceridwen Dovey, Ursula Dubosarsky and Jennifer Mills have been published in one volume as A Concise Compendium of Wonder by Pink Shorts Press. (Supplied: Pink Shorts Press)<\/p>\n
Packer has a long history with The Little Match Girl. He was so enchanted by a production of the fairy tale by Danish theatre company Gruppe 38 he saw in Montreal in 2005, it inspired him to start his own children’s theatre company.<\/p>\n
When Gruppe 38 brought the show to Tasmania for Ten Days on the Island in 2007, Packer took the new Slingsby creative team to Launceston to see the show.<\/p>\n
“Gruppe 38 makes work that speaks both to children and to adults in a very honest way. They don’t shy away from the darkness, which is what we as a company have sought to do as well,” Packer says.<\/p>\n
“We don’t copy or try to reproduce what Gruppe 38 do; we make our own work in our own way, but we have a commitment to that honesty to young audiences, not to protect them but to prepare them for the world.”<\/p>\n
An earlier planned adaptation of The Little Match Girl was scuppered by funding changes.<\/p>\n
Now, the triptych that includes The Tree of Life will be Slingsby’s final production, with the theatre company set to close after once again missing out on critical federal government funding.<\/p>\n
Theatre company signals final curtain call<\/a><\/p>\n Key figures from Adelaide-based family theatre company Slingsby have decided to let the curtain drop for the final time after missing out on federal government funding.<\/p>\n It’s a poignant swansong to an era spanning two decades.<\/p>\n Packer describes The Little Match Girl as “a tough story”.<\/p>\n “It’s a story where the world is very bleak for a child. Everywhere that central character looks, there is hardship,” he says.<\/p>\n “For me, what Hans Christian Andersen is asking us to consider is that the imagination can be a place that we retreat to. In a way, creativity and the imagination is another dimension where we can find joy and make peace with the world.<\/p>\n “That is what is happening for the Little Match Girl, even though the world is terrible when she sits and scratches those matches \u2026 The human capacity for imagining beautiful things is something that we should celebrate.”<\/p>\n Shooting for the Moon<\/p>\n As far as adaptations go, The Tree of Light is a radical reimagining of Andersen’s famous tale.<\/p>\n Packer’s brief to Dovey included just one concrete instruction: set the story in the future.<\/p>\n The writer certainly fulfilled the brief, setting her story in a colony on the Moon in 3099.<\/p>\n Packer first conceived the idea for a triptych as a novel way to reduce Slingsby’s carbon footprint. (Supplied: Eyefood)<\/p>\n “The agreement was that we would have the freedom to adapt the story however we needed for the theatrical context, which gave us great freedom,” Packer says.<\/p>\n “But, also, she gave us the perfect story to adapt.”<\/p>\n While the setting is different, Dovey’s version shares the same emotional truth as Andersen’s tale.<\/p>\n The character of the little match girl remains, but the benevolent grandmother has been transfigured into a tree.<\/p>\n “There is still the repeated image of the candle being lit and visions coming to that character that bring her peace and a sense of transitioning into something else, to another life,” Packer says.<\/p>\n “But we certainly don’t shy away from the fact that that central character dies; we witness that as we do in the original story.”<\/p>\n In typical Slingsby style, the audience is drawn into the narrative from the start.<\/p>\n “We don’t want the audience to be sitting there passively. We want them to have a role in the show,” Packer says.<\/p>\n Astronomy meets in literature in two new books<\/a><\/p>\n Award-winning writers Ceridwen Dovey and Alicia Sometimes explore what it means to be human in their new books set in space.<\/p>\n The audience sits inside a wooden structure that they soon learn is the hollow trunk of the last remaining tree on the Moon, located in the Persephone colony.<\/p>\n “They’re settlers of the colony, and that came from Ceridwen’s incredible description of what it would be like to live on the Moon, a lot of which was scientifically factual from her research,” Packer says.<\/p>\n At the time, Dovey was working on another book \u2014 her short story collection Only the Astronauts, in which she gives voice to a series of inanimate objects in space \u2014 and he says the two projects informed each other.<\/p>\n “It all came together so beautifully.”<\/p>\n A gruesome end<\/p>\n The Tree of Light is not the only Andersen adaptation currently gracing Australian stages.<\/p>\n Cabaret performer Meow Meow is taking her production of another Andersen fairy tale, The Red Shoes, to the west coast for the Perth Festival in 2026.<\/p>\n Meow Meow \u2014 the stage name of Melissa Madden Gray \u2014 has previously adapted two other Andersen works for the stage: The Little Match Girl (2011) and The Little Mermaid (2016).<\/p>\n “Little Karen [is] a less likeable heroine because she’s made by the author into a figure of greed and ambition,” Meow Meow told ABC Radio National’s The Stage Show. (Supplied: Perth Festival)<\/p>\n “I’m always so shocked by his vicious morality tales \u2026 I’m always trying to fix them,” she told ABC Radio National’s The Music Show<\/a>.<\/p>\n “Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales are always so redolent and lush in their language; they’re poetic and I can really get swept away with those. It feels pungent with beauty.<\/p>\n “Hans Christian Andersen’s feel so much more dry and so much more instructional.”<\/p>\n The Red Shoes is a case in point. In the fairy tale, a young girl becomes obsessed with a pair of red shoes and wears them to church, where a soldier curses her to dance forever.<\/p>\n “[Eventually] she begs an executioner in the woods to chop her feet off, [but] the little feet keep dancing,” she says.<\/p>\n “It’s absolutely gruesome, she has to be absolutely humbled. At the end, there’s no more vanity or desire \u2026 her heart breaks and, with that, she goes into heaven.”<\/p>\n Listen to The Music Show<\/a><\/p>\n The Music Show is about the creation and enjoyment of music, from Handel to hip-hop, plainsong to punk.<\/p>\n Meow Meow’s version brings some much-needed joy to the story, reconfiguring dance as the “cure” rather than the punishment.<\/p>\n She finds it curious that Andersen was passionate about dance and even auditioned for the ballet as a teen.<\/p>\n “He’s usually the heroine in his stories,” she says.<\/p>\n “He is the mermaid, he is the ugly duckling, he is Karen, and, in a way, he is punishing himself for his own vanity, his own need, his own social climbing.”<\/p>\n Layered with meaning, Andersen’s works are ripe for interpretation for modern audiences, she says.<\/p>\n “The Red Shoes is really about greed and that’s what we’re looking at in the world today \u2026 unfettered greed.”<\/p>\n The Tree of Light<\/a> is at Adelaide Festival until March 15. Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes<\/a> is at Perth Festival until March 1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Ceridwen Dovey was 12, she played the lead role in her school’s production of The Little Mermaid.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":506468,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[254313,144765,254314,64,63,254308,134,88788,163849,142304,254310,254312,254311,254309],"class_list":["post-506467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-a-concise-compendium-of-wonder","tag-adelaide-festival","tag-andy-packer","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-ceridwen-dovey","tag-entertainment","tag-hans-christian-andersen","tag-meow-meow","tag-perth-festival","tag-slingsby-theatre-company","tag-the-little-match-girl","tag-the-red-shoes","tag-tree-of-light"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/e6d082bc321a1aeb9ebea3467b18e086.jpeg\")
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