MAN ABOUT TOWN

The latest production from Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre is an ambitious musical reinterpretation of the traditional story of Sleeping Beauty . It's not musical theatre in the traditional sense, there being no dialogue at all all; while the songs used to propel the story are selected from a range of existing sources, including Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' 'Deep in the Woods', Elvis Costello and David Bowie, rather than being originally written for this show. A s explained to me two weeks back by director Michael Kantor (who devised the production, together with Paul Jackson, Maryanne Lynch and Anna Tregloan) this version of Sleeping Beauty is, among other things, an attempt to explore the way fairy tales are used to indocrinate children and teach them how to behave in our society. Beauty's long sleep then, is indicative of the way in which young girls are taught that to be attractive, they must be passive; helpless until rescued by their own Prince Charming (p...

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: tha...