INTERVIEW: Sleeping Beauty

Fractured fairy tales

Richard Watts ventures into the dark world of Sleeping Beauty, the latest production from Malthouse Theatre.

Thanks to the likes of German professors the Brothers Grimm and the Walt Disney Company, European fairy tales such as Snow White and Hansel and Gretel are today well known by adults and children alike.

Modern variants of such tales have been sanitised by time and retelling, so that their bleaker elements – cannibalism, murder and dismemberment – have been excised, or at least glossed over. Simultaneously, aspects which reinforce the status quo of male dominance and female helplessness have been left unchanged.

“I think that we still use these fairy tales to indoctrinate our children and induct them into adulthood,” explains Michael Kantor, the artistic director of Malthouse Theatre, and the director of an ambitious new production of Sleeping Beauty.

In books, films, television and advertising, the same message shines through, he suggests: that girls must be saved by a prince, not succeed on their own merits.

“Part of the process of adolescence is that girls become recessive, asleep; they are enacted on rather than enact,” he says. “That’s deeply ingrained within our culture still. You see it with the women on these huge billboards, lying back with ants crawling on them or cuddling a teddybear; it’s all the same message, that a girl is this thing to be taken, eaten, consumed, to be kissed, and it’s only through that that you’ll become the acceptable woman we need you to be.”

In his new production of Sleeping Beauty, developed in collaboration with writer/dramaturge Maryanne Lynch, production designer Anna Tregloan and lighting designer Paul Jackson, Kantor is turning such notions on their head.

“What we do is rather than let Sleeping Beauty simply sleep through her 100 years, she dreams, and she’s very active in her dreams, and clashes with all of these stereotypes and clichés,” he enthuses.

One means by which the production achieves this is through song. While not musical theatre as it is traditionally known, a diverse selection of songs informs the plot of Sleeping Beauty, including tracks by Elvis Costello, David Bowie and Billy Joel.

It was these same songs that convinced soul diva Renee Geyer to participate in the production in a leading role, despite her initial hesitance about appearing on stage.

“I've done the odd film and TV cameo [but] I’m not an actress, to most people’s surprise,” Geyer said earlier this year. “People just assume when you’re a singer that you’re an actor.”

Having stated that she would only appear in Sleeping Beauty “if the songs are my cup of tea”, once she heard them, Geyer immediately agreed.

“The song choice is extraordinary. They run the gamut from Elvis Costello to Nick Cave to Chopin,” she told The Age.

For opera baritone Grant Smith, who appears alongside Geyer in the production, songs such as Nick Cave’s ‘Deep in the Woods’ perfectly match the dark tone of the production, and of the earliest versions of fairytales such as Sleeping Beauty.

“If you read any of those early fairy stories, they really look at the dark side of life. Nowadays they’re all ‘happy-happy!’, but when these stories were first written it was all dark stuff; beware the big bad, and it’s that side of things that Michael [Kantor] is really interested in,” says Smith.

Sleeping Beauty at Malthouse Theatre, July 6 – 28. Bookings on www.malthousetheatre.com.au or 9685 5111.