Our Theatre Company has always been set on the idea to use the original story of Cinderella by Charles Perrault. We knew that we wanted to explore what would happen if Cinderella decided to get revenge on the sisters, but we were just unsure how to do it. The main idea was to have it in a surrealistic dream world, but we struggled to figure out what it was exactly we wanted to do. We were focusing on trying to get surrealistic elements into the play, when really we just wanted the aspect of the dream world rather than a full surrealistic play. Finally after a few weeks of struggling to create a story that would portray everything we wanted, we decided to pose each scene as a different genre and have characters that don’t fit in to any of the genres of scenarios. First we would start with shadow puppets to show the ‘real’ world and then turn to live action to show the dream world.

The puppet scene tells an edited version of the Charles Perrault story and ends with Cinderella snapping and not being able to cope with all the abuse from her sisters. The Monologue is read by a Narrator in a traditional way with fairy tale like music in the background. At certain points such as when the sisters “Laugh and goad Cinderella” a soundscape of sinister laughter begins in the background to create a soundscape that will lead Cinderella into the dreamland.

We took inspiration from clips such as this from YouTube, uploaded by Pegasus English Language School.

With this inspiration we created our own puppets to open the play.

Pegasus English Language School (2014) Sleeping Beauty – Shadow Puppet Theatre

. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj1EGbNKBho [accessed 13 May 2016].