I remember when I was a child my parents (having decided that I was capable of operating a tape player) bought me a collection of fairy tales (Grimm’s, Christian Anderson’s and Irish folk tales) that I could listen to on cassette. You could say that my parent grew tired of reading me the same stories over and over, being told not to skip any pages (I knew a lot of the stories off) and never being pleased with just one story. You could say that (an there probably is a hint of truth in it) but for me it was fantastic.
The tapes allowed me to listen to whatever story I wanted, whenever I wished, and stop when I’d had enough. It allowed me to skip to the bits I liked, pause when I needed to and rewind as often as the batteries allowed. Pause. Rewind. Play. Stories began to flow into each other; merging and melding beginnings and ends and lots of middles. I wandered between forests, seas and clouds. Worlds were created and found to encompass not one but all the stories I listened to.
In our development of some of the scenes for the show we have all been racking our brains, playing and talking out the possible solutions the ‘need-to-be-tweaked scenes’. Children’s stories were a big base for the play. Ideas, images and questions all flowed from the stories we told each other when we started working on the play. In the tweaking period nothing has changed. When we find the right tweak we know it. It's like finding your favourite part of the story. You find it and the rest is there between the lines.
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