Wilde about this winter treat which promises fun for all the family
Ashcroft Arts Centre, Fareham The Spring Arts Centre, Havant tessabide.com
Tessa Bide Productions bring their charming adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant to two arts centres in our region as part of a mini tour this month.
They will be performing the children’s show at Ashcroft in Fareham on December 12 and then The Spring in Havant from December 21 to 23.
But, as with so many of us, this was not how they planned their 2020.
‘We made the show a couple of years ago in 2018 and it's toured a lot since then,’ says Tessa. ‘This Easter just gone we were supposed to be doing quite a big tour and going up into Scotland for the Puppet Animation Festival. The Ashcroft and the Forest Arts Cen tre (New Milton) were booked in for that tour – we've rescheduled them twice now, once to November and now back to December, and then The Spring is our little Christmas run.
‘It's just those three venues, which is going to be lovely.’
Although it has been ‘a rough year’, Tessa has found that being adap table has been the key to survival.
‘There are benefits to being creatives – we're very used to coming up against a brick wall and having to find a way round it or over it or under it.
‘Where my theatre company is very small – it only has two or three permanent members of staff – although that meant we weren't eligible for most of the emergency funding, which was a shame, it's meant that we can do quite drastic Uturns and rejig how we make work.
‘We had a funding grant from the Arts Council just before lockdown to tour one of our shows across the UK. We wrote to them and said: ‘Can we reuse this to make a digital online piece?’ And they said we could.
‘We've released a digital, interactive, choose your own adventure-style adaptation of a show we made last year called The Anarchist’s Mobile Library, and that's now doing a digital tour.
‘We're in quite a fortunate position in that we've got The Selfish Giant touring both live, and because we've got a recorded version of it, The Spring is offering that out to people to watch at home too. So we've got digital stuff and the live shows. We're doing all right but it's a bit of a rollercoaster in many respects.’
The Selfish Giant was originally created with Soap Soup Theatre, a company started by Tessa’s friend, Tomasin Cuthbert Menes.
‘Soap Soup’s work quite often adapts traditional stories, and my work normally devises original work from scratch. Tomasin approached me for The Selfish Giant. There's so many beautiful elements in it, and it's kind of wintery without being too festive so it's a good one to put on in the winter for people who might not celebrate Christmas – it's got that traditional story about someone learning a lesson and there being retribution in the end.
‘But we also really enjoyed the challenge in making more accessible to audiences of today.’
Wilde’s original short story contains some heavy-handed Christian allegories at the end, which they decided to change.
‘The story starts really beautifully. Then it's almost like he took a couple of weeks off, and in that time someone had rapped him on the knuckles and said: “This needs to be more religious”,’ she laughs. 'It's quite an abrupt change of tone.’
Now, the focus is on the unlikely friendship between a little girl and the giant, Grinter.
‘It's more about their friendship and learning the lessons from that. We also wanted it to have this circle of life – a going-through-the-seasons feel to it.
‘Hopefully we've done the story justice but given it a nice fresh twist.’
Tessa and Tomasin were the original performers in the show, but with the latter taking time out to become a mother, Stevie Thompson is joining Tessa.
However, taking a show out in the current climate does mean they’ve needed to make some changes to the way it’s staged.
‘I'm really looking forward to getting out again and it's as safe as we can make it.
‘The important thing for anyone coming is that we've rejigged it so we no longer go into the audience. We don't have physical contact with them, but we do have verbal interaction.’
And she promises it still remains a festive treat for the family. ‘This show is very sumptuous visually – it's a real visual treat, so we don't need to rely on any of those classic pantomime-y things, and the puppetry is gorgeous, so hopefully even from a distance we can draw the audience in.
She also praises the 18-strong team of freelancers who helped create the show: ‘It just goes to show the iceberg-effect in theatre – what you see on the stage is a tiny little part of the process and the team, there's this huge machine whirring in the background.’