Our Manifesto

Progeny Theatre Company Manifesto

“Nobody is too old for fairy tales: We make children’s theatre for adults”

There is a substantial culture today for children’s theatre. Parents encourage their children to embrace both the educational and cultural values of the theatre experience, but why does children’s theatre have to be strictly for children? Progeny Theatre Company questions why these perfectly magical yet mysterious stories are performed purely for innocent children, when the darker and more intense themes present in most could be explored further. They aspire to create children’s theatre, which specifically targets adults by drawing out the more mature themes from these stories and enhancing them through numerous technical devices.

Progeny Theatre Company says:

• Down with forcing parents to sit through hours of sterilised children’s entertainment censored to avoid ‘polluting’ children’s minds.
• Down with ‘fluffy’ and highly sanitised children’s stories.
• Down with following practitioner’s practices to the letter, why can’t we break down boundaries to create a newer unique style of theatre?
• Down with naturalistic performance – the stage is a liminal space where directors and designers have freedom to create anything they want, so why can’t they embrace that?

Theatre should be used as a form of escapism for its audience, to give them a chance to experience that which they have not seen, a spectacle before their very eyes. As a company, our aim is to extract the essence of the story, reducing the fairytale to its core. We can then reconstruct this core into a new form which explores all the darkly magical elements that each story has to offer. We want to inspire an element of nostalgia for our audience by reintroducing the story to them as adults, in an adapted format.

Angela Carter is an inspirational author who especially appeals to our company and its aims. She adapts children’s fairy tales into stories, which entirely encapsulate the darkness and mysterious nature of ‘the fairytale’. Her work combines the innocence of the story while exposing the dark personality of the fairytale. To ensure the magic of the fairytale is not lost once adapted, the story’s enchanting character can be augmented through sophisticated technical devices. Some may argue that highly technical and elaborate theatre acts only to distract and overpower the theatre experience. We, however, believe that by creating a spectacle with complex set, lighting and costume, the magic of these stories can be heightened thus producing a captivating and engaging experience for its adult audience. Edward Gordon Craig was at the forefront of technical theatre development and produced spectacles which bombarded its audience with a myriad of colours, lights and sounds, transforming the stage into a wonderland, the likes of which had never been experienced before.

Our company, therefore, aims to achieve a perfect balance between the mystical yet thought-provoking story and the innovative technical devices to recreate a spectacle right out of a story book.