Scottish theatre promising 'visual surprises' in new-look Cinderella
The team behind this year’s Christmas show at the Citz hope to capture the audience’s imagination with a procession of theatrical tricks, writes Mark Fisher
It is always nice to feel welcome in a theatre, but this Christmas director Joanna Bowman wants to go one step further. In her staging of Cinderella at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre, she is inviting everyone to the ball.
“The production is thrilled that the audience has arrived,” she says. “We’re reaching a hand out to the audience and saying, ‘Thanks for being with us. Now we can begin.’”
That spirit of inclusivity, she hopes, will spill over into every aspect of the show, including the design. Sitting with her at the end of a day’s rehearsal is designer Jessica Worrall. Working with Bowman for the third time, Worrall hopes to capture the audience’s imagination with a procession of theatrical tricks. There will be trapdoors, gauzes, a bear and a cuddly dog. It is all held together with a look she describes as “rococo K-pop”.
“I haven’t done anything this lavish for a while,” says the designer, a veteran of the People Show theatre collective. “It’s a bit Adam Ant, a bit Vivienne Westwood, a bit Marie Antoinette and, at the same time, all these modern touches in it. It’s nice to be playful and over-the-top.”
Neighbours in Glasgow, she and Bowman agreed on the approach from the start. “We came to our first meeting saying we have to deliver visual surprise all the way until the end of the show,” says the director. “Not until the final blackout have the treats stopped for the audience.”
Worrall continues: “It’s a series of reveals. Just when you think you know the world, something happens. That’s a parallel with Cinderella: every time she thinks she knows where she is, something happens. It’s the idea of growing up and being up-ended all the time and her reality shifting.”
Once upon a time, no Christmas was complete without one of Stuart Paterson’s fairytale adaptations. The playwright was famed for writing shows that treated archetypal stories with heart, humour and seriousness. First seen at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum in 1989, this Cinderella was one of the playwright’s greatest successes. Along with versions of Beauty and the Beast, The Sleeping Beauty and others, it dominated the festive schedules in Scotland, the UK and Europe in the 1990s. Paterson was a pioneer of theatrical alternatives to pantomime and for a time was Scotland’s most produced living playwright.
“As well as delivering joyous, generous, inter-generational fun, there’s a moral centre to this Christmas show,” says Bowman who co-directed last year’s excellent Beauty and the Beast at the Citz. “It’s a battle of good and evil – and good might win in the end if we take each other’s wants and needs seriously.”
With a story about a servant girl and a prince, it is also a play about class. Bowman see it as a Trojan horse: a familiar story concealing important questions about society’s upstairs-downstairs divisions. “The work of downstairs is good work,” says the director. “The people upstairs, whose lives are full of luxury and frippery, have an emptiness about them. The moral and political centre to Stuart’s adaptation is lightly and deftly woven through.”
Paterson’s association with the Citz goes back to the start of his career in 1982 when the company’s youth arm, TAG, staged Merlin the Magnificent, followed the next year by an in-house production of The Snow Queen. This version of Cinderella was last seen at the Gorbals theatre in 2017.
As designer, Worral has been thinking about the legacy of these and other productions at a theatre famed for its visually elegant stagings of European classics. “The key to the design is to make it seem like it’s traditional then twist it and allow it to seem relevant to today,” she says. “The world we’ve created is slightly anachronistic. If there’s a bunch of teenagers in the audience, I know which bits they’re going to say, ‘Oh, that’s so cool!’”
Taking the title role is Molly Geddes, recently seen at Edinburgh’s Traverse in the award-winning Water Colour. “We saw tens of brilliant young actors, but when Molly came in there was something about her being of the same place as the Citz and of the Citz’s audience,” says Bowman. “It felt essential that the Cinderella that we put centre stage would reflect back the audience. There’s a real energy to Molly which means that the play tumbles forwards. This Cinderella chooses and the whole world shifts.”
No two-dimensional cut-out, Paterson’s Cinderella is a girl with everyday imperfections who plays an active role in how the story pans out. “The exciting thing about Stuart’s Cinderella is that she is naughty, playful and flawed,” says Bowman. “She’s an antagonist as well as a protagonist. The choices she makes are not easy ones. There are genuine internal and external obstacles that she has to negotiate.”
Watching rehearsals, Worrall has loved seeing Geddes in action: “She plays it so real. It makes you think the choice she makes could be different. That’s good because, as a young person, you are going, ‘I think this is what I want… I’m pretty sure it is…’”
This summer, Bowman made her directorial debut at the Royal Shakespeare Company with The Two Gentlemen of Verona and will be back in Stratford-upon-Avon with a Romeo and Juliet in 2027. She thinks of Shakespeare’s story of star-crossed lovers in similar terms to Cinderella: a familiar tale that can be reinvigorated when seen afresh.
“It’s just a great story,” says Bowman, who earned the best director gong in the 2024 CATS Awards for her production of Escaped Alone at Glasgow’s Tron. “Stuart’s version delivers everything you would expect from Cinderella and still manages to surprise and thrill. Like Beauty and the Beast last year, it’s surprising audiences by delivering an irreverent, hyper-theatrical version of a story they think they know and saying to them, ‘You’re here, we’re here and together, we’re going to imagine a story.’”
Cinderella is at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, from 28 November until 31 December. This feature was produced in association with the Citizens’ Theatre.
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Enjoying the Arts & Culture journalism on scotsman.com? Make it easier to find by selecting us as a preferred Google source
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.