Output details

Rat's Tales

Carol Ann Duffy’s stage play for young audiences - ‘Rats Tales’ - was premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester in November 2012, and directed by Melly Still. It continues a longstanding collaborative relationship between Duffy and Still, and is the latest in a series of their retellings of classic fairy stories under the banner ‘Grimm Tales’. The final published work (by Faber & Faber) includes all eleven of Carol Ann Duffy’s stories responding to the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Alongside these original stories are Melly Still’s (in collaboration with Duffy) stage adaptations of Duffy’s stories. Four of the eleven stories are new versions of stories published in previous books (The Lost Happy Endings – 2006, The Stolen Childhood – 2003) but were substantially reworked for this production / publication. To prepare for this new project, Duffy engaged in detailed research into the roots of the Pied Piper story and its development in the work of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Robert Browning and the Brothers Grimm. Using the Pied Piper story as the backbone of the work, Duffy sought to ‘unpick our relationship to rats, to the dark, grimy fidgety place they occupy in our imaginations.’ In search of wider mythic references to rats, she adapted traditional Italian and Nordic tales for her stories. But the setting of ‘Rats Tales’ is unmistakably and grittily contemporary, drawing on journalistic accounts of real child abductions. Indeed, Alfred Hickling’s 5* review of the play in the Guardian suggested that Rat’s Tales had resonance for adult audiences as much as children: “Duffy's narratives have a remarkable ability to transplant the archetypes of folklore into what could be the case studies of an overextended social worker. Rat's Tales is the perfect nightmare before Christmas.”