Foreword to Rapunzel

On a blue-black, icy winter’s night in 2003, in an isolated house in the Mendip Hills, I began to read the story of Rapunzel to my daughters. It was a bland retelling which I didn’t think captured the horror, the passion or the intrigue of the story as I remember it. But the image of Rapunzel’s hair falling down like a curtain of light stayed with me and I began to wonder if I could work the story into a play.

Dismayed by the current fad for the Barbification of fairytales and the hegemony of Disney (note from 2022; this was before Disney had discovered diversity, y’all) I turned to the master of saltiness and earthiness, Italo Calvino, for his fantastic versions of hundreds of folk tapes, including many variants on the Rapunzel tale.I then went back further still, to Basile, the bawdy, irreverent first collector of folk tales in Italian. I read hundreds of variants - wildly different in detail but united by the herby name of the heroine, her va va voom, her cunning, and some sort of incarceration in a tower. I wanted my Rapunzel to have the wit, the sass, the spirit of these Basile and Calvino heroines. I wanted her journey to have real growth and suffering. I wanted her activley to choose the prine, not just go with him because he happened to hop into her tower. And I wanted her to be flesh and blood, not some odourless, laminated dollybird

I’d seen Kneehigh’s The Red Shoes at the Lyric Hammersmith and had thought - that’s it, that’s who I have to work with - but didn’t expect anything to happen when I sent the first draft to Emma Rice in 2004. I’m amazed to be working with Kneehigh at BAC and in awe of their process and the direction in which they have helped me take the play. Thanks to Emma, Mike, and everyone at Kneehigh, David Jubb and all at BAC, David Farr, Simon Reade, Italo Calvino and Giambattista Basile.

– Annie Siddons