Developing an Idea

At the very beginning of the devising process, we looked towards Kneehigh Theatre Company to gain ideas of what we could do for our piece. During our research, we saw that Kneehigh often recreate fairy tales in a dark and twisted way, writing the script at the very end and working on their characters first. We decided a perfect fairy tale to adapt would be Cinderella, as everybody knows it. We didn't cast specific people for each role, instead the roles fell into place the more we talked about our piece. As there are two boys in our group (Matt Holley and Matthew Brierly), we thought they would be brilliant and comedic as the ugly sisters of Cinderella, and myself and Charlotte Trimble wanted to play the good and evil fairies. This left Charlotte Morley to be Cinderella, which worked out perfectly. Unintentionally, we had copied the same sort of casting process they have at Kneehigh, where the roles just fall into place and each actor begins developing their character straight away.


We were concerned that with such a well-known family fairy tale, our performance wouldn't be dark enough to have truly stemmed from the ideas of Kneehigh Theatre Company, so we decided to start developing the darkest scene possible: a scene where the ugly sisters get extreme plastic surgery to change their appearance, turning them into complete Barbie dolls. We talked about the idea of throwing red ribbon into the air to symbolise blood, and having the sisters shout out their insecurities and talk about the models they aspire to look like. We hoped this would be hard-hitting to some audience members who may have witnessed this kind of situation in real life, seeing a young person trying to conform to ridiculous standards of beauty. This is the reason a lot of teenagers suffer with conditions such as anorexia and self harm. We also talked about the idea of using photo frames or mirrors to add depth to the piece and make it more visually spectacular.


As one of the key themes in our piece is mental health, we decided that the two fairies would be a figure of Cinderella's imagination, as if she has a condition similar to schizophrenia. We would not dwell on this two much, as we wouldn't want to detract from the main theme of body image, however we wanted to link it to the fairy tale world. Like Kneehigh, we wanted our piece to be set in the world of the play, a world made up by us. We didn't want modern technology such as mobile phones and cars, but we didn't want 20th century ideas either, as body image is a relevant issue at the moment.
Due to this, we decided to add in an opening scene before the catwalk, explaining how the whole situation came about. We wanted the fairies to dispute on what kind of story to create, and so they end up with a dark fairy tale (darkness- the evil fairy's idea/fairy tale & Cinderella- the good fairies idea).