The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Jane Talbot:
The Wonder Tales
Storytelling is as much performing as writing for Jane Talbot.
The Wiltshire-born author made her mark with her 2015 debut collection The Faerie Thorn. Now she’s set to return to her former home with the stage show that’s inspired its follow-up.
Aimed at adults, The Wonder Tales captures Jane’s passion for the oral tradition of dark fairytales, as well as Victorian steampunk, vaudeville and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge.
The energetic one-woman show sees Jane turn wandering minstrel to recount three macabre yarns influenced by Irish folklore. “I’m not a writer of happy-everafter,” she explains.
“My stories are in the style of the original Brothers Grimm collection where horrible things happened with a lot of unresolved endings.”
The ex-teacher reckons storytelling can galvanise communities eroded by social media, lack of mindfulness and redundancy.
“People make a kind of unconscious bargain for the duration of the performance to suspend their disbelief and work together to help build something magic,” she says.
“One of my stories is about things that we face that’re uncomfortable, like our mortality and who’ll have to deal with that. So there’s a truth that an adult understands and a child never will.”
Jane’s first stab at narrative came on a youth project in Denmark as a languages student in the 1980s, before performing for children in Warsaw-Pact-era Poland.
“I collected songs and used to sing in French, German and Italian,” she recalls. “People gave me stories all about how they learnt them and they became bigger than the songs. Eventually my storytelling took over completely.”
After moving from Crieff to a farm in Northern Ireland in 2011, Jane decided to write her bewitching rural-set debut.
Listed for 2016’s Edge Hill Short Story Prize and the Saboteur Awards, the work was subsequently adapted for the stage — which kick-started her theatrical career. “I was surrounded by actors for a couple of years and decided I’d just write a show for myself,” she laughs.
“I don’t have a big budget for pyrotechnics, but if the audience engages with me it can be quite powerful just standing up and talking without many bells and whistles. I’m in my 50s and I can’t really walk the day after a show. I do a lot of leaping around!”
Jane says the stories she performs in The Wonder Tales have a finite stage existence but will reappear as part of two forthcoming print collections.
“Every time I perform there’s a magic that never happens at your desk,” she adds. “So when I think I’ve found the story’s best version I write it down and it’s kind of trapped on the page and probably won’t get performed again.”