Director’s Foreword

When I first read Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber I was a sixth form student at a time where I was being introduced to writers such as Sarah Kane, Sebastian Faulks and Andrea Levy. In such an eclectic mix it was Angela Carters works that caught my over analytical eye. When reading her work I didn’t feel like I was searching for a meaning but rather simply just experiencing the terrific feeling of the unknown, which is what we at Progeny Theatre have created in A Gothic Tale.

When Progeny Theatre first formed we all came in with the belief that children’s theatre for adults was something that creates excitement and endless opportunity to experiment with creating a world separate from our own. It is a form of escapism in its own right, we are giving the audience back their freedom to interpretation. This is not a play with a political message, it’s not something that asks you take sides, to question where you stand on an issue or to evaluate how you feel at the end. It is a play where we remove the structure of tradition in the theatre, and produce our own Gothic fairy tale world to take you out of your own, where you feel comfortable experiencing the perfectly imperfect.

We have adapted Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and The Snow Child and combined them into a piece of theatre. I have focused on the exploration of liminality and the feeling of being on the threshold between two places of being, what you see in this high spectacle and visually exciting piece  is the collision between the border of our subconscious and the reality we live in.  An exploration of what is fairy tale, imaginary, beautiful and sublime.

A Gothic Tale as Progeny Theatre’s first production presents a corrupted, challenging and sometimes uncomfortable version of reality versus fantasy. It ignites controversy, excites the feeling of the unknown, corrupts the imagination and asks the question of what we see as truly monstrous. A Gothic Tale creates, a world which combines the absolutely great and the infinitely grotesque.

We aim to produce theatre that recaptures the awe and freedom children associate with fairy tales and bring this to the adult world, reproducing the feeling of the sublime and visual splendor – removing you from the fast pace of the world we live in and offering an escape for an hour to the unscheduled world of Angela Carter.

– Stephanie Doe, Director.