Sleeping Beauty in trousers? Go on, then

I’m guessing that Tory MP Peter Bone has not been to a Sally Cookson production. 

The Tory MP, quoted gleefully on The Sun and Daily Telegraph websites, believes that director Cookson’s decision to give Bristol Old Vic’s Christmas show Sleeping Beauty a male hero (played by David Emmings, pictured above) is – and apologies if this phrase is unfamiliar to you – “political correctness gone mad”.

Karen Sherr, founder of national pre-school theatre group Musical Minis, reasons: “Lots of little girls want to be princesses. They just want to go to the pantomime to see a princess in a pretty dress.”

She has a point: the majority of little girls probably do want to be princesses, and will want to see a princess in a pretty dress come panto time. But does that mean that every Christmas show up and down the land should slavishly follow this template? We’d live in a culturally poorer world, it seems to me, if these norms weren’t able to be tinkered with.

This Christmas, from the Hippodrome’s Snow White to Weston Playhouse’s Cinderella via hundreds of community and big-stage Christmas shows (I really don’t need to tell you this, do I?), there will be plenty of alternatives for the very many families who – and absolutely fair play to them – would rather play it straight, thank you very much.

All credit to Sally Cookson and her creative team, though, for wanting to do things a little differently. “We wanted a proactive heroine,” she tells The Observer. “Both the hero and the heroine can be vulnerable and brave. We don’t pigeonhole.”

Or, as a colleague here at Bristol24/7 observes: “I can tell you for a fact, my six-year-old niece would probably want to dress as a princess to go to the panto – but she would also love to see a male prince rescued by a female princess. Because she knows that girls and boys, women and men alike can be heroes and strong and brave. And that is exactly as it should be.” 

Sally Cookson also notes, astutely, that “every time a fairytale is retold we cannot help but adapt it in line with our ideology, regardless of whether that is a conscious plan”.

That’s true – and this playful piece of gender reassignment simply reflects, among other things, today’s more fluid notions around gender roles.

Not that all this hoohah will matter much to thousands of Bristol theatre audiences who’ve sampled the strange and magical alchemy that seems to occur every time Cookson assembles her creative partners (musician Benji Bower, dramaturg Adam Peck, designer Katie Sykes and others) to create another show.

Peter Pan, Treasure Island, The Boy Who Cried Wolf: this team produce a brand of theatre in which the power of storytelling and the imagination is given total primacy – where lyrical and witty writing, flexible staging and an all-pervasive sense of wonder make an audience’s suspension of disbelief not so much a requirement as, from the moment the curtain goes up, a given. 

I had no trouble seeing Chris Bianchi as an indefatigable, onesie-clad hare and a blues-singing sun in The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the Old Vic’s summer 2013 show on the cobbles of King Street. I’m really not gonna struggle with a Sleeping Beauty in trousers.