As an ‘all-female team’, not just the more feminine associated roles of costume and female acting roles would be done by women in our company and we wanted this strength and versatility of women to be reflected in our piece as it would be in our company’s structure. However, we wanted to do this in a way that wouldn’t make the audience fell as though it was being shoved down their throats or they were being preached at.
Fairytales are known by all and often feature a damsel in distress who gets saved by the male hero. What better way to show the strength of women than through a well-known story about women. The next step was to choose a fairy tale and an issue or event through which to see women. We went away to think of different issues and different tales.
When we brainstormed our ideas we found the most popular ones linked the issue to the tale. For example makeup, self-image and body confidence was linked to Rapunzel with her tower a metaphor for her anxiety, ‘porridge’ became a STI in Goldilocks and even though someone had sex with her, she was the one labelled a slut and Pinocchio was the media’s (literal) puppet.

The start of our ideas

We decided to focus on the story of ‘Cinderella’, a young woman abused by her Step-mother and Step-sisters, as it featured women that were passive and kind- Cinderella- and women that were cruel and dominant- the Step-mother.
Now that we had the story, we had to decide on an issue. Our first thought was abuse, how Cinderella suffered at the hands of her sisters and how we could link this to a modern day issue. We went through a range of ideas- cyber bullying, domestic abuse, peer groups, specifically how women were affected by these. However, we wanted something that didn’t single out women as that neither celebrated their strength (as the fact we were speaking for them would make them seem as though they needed representation) nor gave the audience the chance to have their own decisions about the characters and story. We then decided to go back to basics. Just as Fairy tales are timeless, so should the issue they were used to address, meaning that rather than being a specifically modern day issue, it should be one that could be openly interpreted. This led us to question why the sisters behaved the way they did towards Cinderella. The answer, we decided, would be the plot.
Just as the sisters were abusing Cinderella, their mother was abusing them, showing the effects people can have on others and the impact of their choices. Following on from this idea and people having a dark and a light side, we wondered what would happen if Cinderella was the abusive one towards her sisters than as in the Disney version, which people would potentially be more familiar with, had Cinderella leaving her abuse through marrying a prince, rather than turning on her sisters. As the focus of the piece was the idea of each person having both good and bad in them but them choosing which one to act on, we had to find a style that could show the thoughts of Cinderella but in way that made sense to the audience as well as staying loyal to the focus of the piece.